Nearly 20 Birmingham City Council staff are having to deal with applications from schools wishing to become academies, the authority’s education chief has revealed.

Coun Les Lawrence, cabinet member for children, young people and families, said 17 members of staff had been tasked with dealing with applications from city schools wishing to leave local authority control. There are currently eight schools in the city that have either moved to academy status or are doing so.

A further 11 schools have applied to convert to academy status, including Arthur Terry School in Sutton Coldfield and Bartley Green Technology College.

Coun Lawrence told a meeting of the council’s education watchdog committee he has ordered a “financial audit” to determine exactly how much is being spent by the authority on handling applications.

Coun Lawrence said: “There are 17 staff involved in areas like legal, HR, admissions and appeals and so on.

“This is a secondary activity – all these officers also have their day job too. All the costs the local authority incurs relating to all the work in assisting the schools to become converter academies is at our own cost, not the Secretary of State’s.”

Academies are publicly funded independent schools, free from local authority and national Government control.

Other Birmingham schools who have identified an intention to convert to academy status are King Edward VI Aston School, King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys, King Edward Camp Hill for Girls, King Edward VI Five Ways School, King Edward VI Handsworth, Kings Norton Girls School, Lordswood Girls School, Harborne, Stockland Green Technology College and Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls.

NASUWT teaching union representative John Hemingway said the council had a “job to do” in convincing schools to remain under local authority control.

He said: “We are being run ragged over this in terms of consultation meetings and meeting with members. With the new academy programme schools think they will be financially better off.’’