England's school privatisation experiment should be “dead” after a failing academy chain was forced to surrender a third of its schools, the Anti Academies Alliance said yesterday.

E-Act, one of the biggest academy chains, will give up 10 of its 34 schools after Ofsted inspectors uncovered serious problems.

Alliance national secretary Alistair Smith called it “the most spectacular failure in British post-war education history.”

It was a catastrophe for parents and pupils “sold a lie that the private sector would be better,” he said, and a personal humiliation for academies architect and E-Act chief executive Sir Bruce Liddington.

“The E-Act catastrophe therefore signals the death of the credibility of the academies programme,” Mr Smith said.

“David Cameron’s shoddy claims to localism are also in tatters as the all-powerful secretary of state (Michael) Gove steps in to micromanage our schools.”

But Mr Smith warned the academies programme would lumber on like a “zombie” until Labour puts schools back in the hands of local authorities.

Teaching union ATL said it showed Mr Gove cannot run schools from Westminster.

“We need proper local oversight of schools, in order to intervene quickly and professionally to support improvement.

“The worst part of this latest failure is the impact on pupils and staff. Mr Gove has to ask himself if toying with students’ life chances is really worth his political dogma.”