The head of Ofsted has launched a blistering attack on Birmingham City Council in the wake of the “Trojan Horse” scandal – and told MPs the city’s education department should be broken up.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, Her Majesty’s chief inspector, told a Commons inquiry that city headteachers had complained the council was “pretty useless”.

But he came under fire from Birmingham council chief executive Mark Rogers, who said: “He’s not living in the real world”.

Sir Michael was giving evidence to a Commons inquiry into extremism in schools, following the Trojan Horse allegations in Birmingham about Muslim extremists trying to take over city schools.

The Ofsted chief called for the existing education authority, currently the council’s education department, to be replaced with a series of smaller authorities across the city.

And he even suggested that Birmingham’s failings meant the planned high speed rail line linking the city with London, Leeds and Manchester would be a waste of money.

Sir Michael told the Commons education committee there had been a “lack of confidence in Birmingham council to support head teachers” before the Trojan Horse claims.

He said: “Well before this issue came up I went to Birmingham to speak to [15 to 20] of the most successful heads in Birmingham, of local authority schools and academies, who said that Birmingham were pretty useless.

“That they wanted to do more and that they’d approached the local authority to do more... and they’d been most unhelpful.”

He added: “It’s a blooming shame really. This is the second city in the land. We are building HS2 to Birmingham, investing a lot of public money in getting people to Birmingham at a faster rate. It should be our second city.”

He told MPs: “We should really worry about what’s happening here.

“The local authority is responsible for the good provision of all children, no matter which school they go to.

“There are some local authorities in the country... which never mind which school they went to, if there was a dip in performance they did something about it. They’d haul the sponsor in and talk to them or they’d write to the department.”

Asked what could be done to improve Birmingham education authority, he said: “Break it up”.

Sir Michael pointed out that inner London once had an overarching education authority until this was abolished in 1990 – and schools had improved, he said.

He told the inquiry that a number of headteachers in Birmingham believed that there had been organised infiltration of the governing bodies of schools by Muslim hardliners.

“The headteachers I spoke to believed there was orchestration and manipulation. I spoke to about eight or nine headteachers and they believe it was planned and orchestrated.

“They believed people got together and decided which schools to target.

“They believed that often governing body meetings couldn’t take place in the normal manner because governors were determined to get their way.”

Last month Ofsted issued a damning verdict on the running of a number of schools in Birmingham.

Five schools in the city were placed in special measures after a series of inspections in the wake of the allegations.

The comments provoked a furious response from council chief executive Mark Rogers, who said it was “utterly disingenuous” to blame the council for problems in academies when it had no authority over them,

Mr Rogers said: “We just do not have a role in intervening in academies. Secondly, he fails to recognise the significant disinvestment that’s been made to school improvement services because of the Government’s cuts to council funding.

“The things it was possible to do when he was a headteacher are no longer possible, because we just no longer have the dozens and dozens of consultants and advisers and school improvement officers that we used to.”

The expansion of academies and free schools, and the Department for Education’s decision to appoint regional school commissioners to oversee academies, had created a “muddle” around who was responsible for schools, said Mr Rogers.

He added: “I think he is acting way above his pay grade in talking about these matters anyway. He’s the Chief Inspectors of Schools, he’s not the Secretary of State for Education.”

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