Teacher mortgages plan to help schools

The government yesterday pledged to stamp out parents' "anguish and fear" over their choice of secondary education for their children in London, as the prime minister set out a package of radical reforms designed to raise standards in the capital over the next five years.

In what is believed to be first move of its kind in Europe, teachers will be offered subsidised mortgages to keep them in London, where soaring house prices have been the biggest single reason for teachers quitting their jobs.

The plans, hailed by the education secretary, Charles Clarke, as amounting to the most radical changes to London schools since the second world war, will mean more school buildings and a change of status for hundreds of schools. Tony Blair has said that 20 secondary schools will be built, along with 30 new specialist city academies, 15 new sixth-form colleges and at least 290 more specialist schools.

Launching the new London schools strategy, Mr Blair said: "No parent or child in one of the world's finest capital cities should be left without a choice of good primary or secondary schools. We need to inject more dynamism and bottom-up pressure for change, locality by locality, particularly in the areas of greatest under-performance and parental dissatisfaction."

Five authorities - Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth and Southwark - where Mr Blair said that school standards were "unacceptably low", will be given extra help and monitoring. In these areas, six out of ten pupils were not achieving five good GCSEs, and in the worst 40 schools, less than a quarter of pupils were reaching this benchmark. Weak headteachers will be removed from their jobs, while strong heads will be given more freedom.

Details of the planned mortgage subsidy are still being worked out, but it is likely to be offered to eligible "high quality" staff who are seen as potential headteachers and who need affordable family homes.

Headteachers gave the proposals a cautious welcome, warning of the budgetary crisis facing many schools in the capital.

Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the biggest classroom teaching union, the National Union of Teachers, said: "The prime minister offers an unrelenting focus on five education authorities which face some of the most difficult problems. Four of those authorities have had their services privatised and have been let down by those private companies."