INFLUENTIAL Tory think tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) set out a sweeping blueprint for more schools privatisation yesterday in a new report claiming to be about “closing the divide” in education.

The CSJ, founded by social security axeman Iain Duncan Smith, hired a host of advisers including representatives from leading academy schools privateers to draw up a hotchpotch of new policy brainwaves.

Its hit list included a big push for charities to get involved in running free schools, a payment-by-results “national improvement programme” to encourage academy chains to take over schools in “disadvantaged” areas and extra powers for new regional schools commissioners to privatise local management.

Critics of policies which strip local authorities of control over education have long warned on the risks of emphasising “good” and “bad” provision rather than mixed-ability schooling as creating a system where some sites are set up to fail.

The government boasted yesterday that 250 free schools — privately run but funded with millions from state education budgets — have opened since 2010.

But even the CSJ report’s pro-privatisation authors, which include figures from academy chains Ark, Leaf and Lead as well as Deutsche Bank, acknowledge that free schools are opening in poorer areas but sucking up the wealthiest and most academically gifted children.

“Many of the existing free schools are not always serving pupils representative of the areas in which they are situated,” they complain.

And the National Union of Teachers (NUT) said that any claim that greater private-sector involvement would address differences in pupils’ grades was missing the point.

It warned that “there is no evidence that school types — including academies, free schools and faith schools — have been effective in tackling disadvantage in education.”

“Education inequality will not be ended until the wider problem of child poverty is eradicated,” said NUT deputy general secretary Kevin Courtney.

“Britain has a growing gap between the wealthiest and least well off families — a shameful fact that the government should address as a matter of urgency if it is serious about improving educational outcomes for children from poor families.”