Heaven 17 and Human League founder Martyn Ware back Sheffield school campaign

The synth pop maestro and socialist activist, who attended the school in Broomhill, Sheffield, as a boy, said ‘the whole academy thing’ was ‘wrong-headed and rubbish’.

“As an ex pupil of King Edward’s I fully support the cause to prevent its academisation – and anybody should,” he said. “It’s completely wrong that parents are being forced to defend something that historically we should all be proud of – state education.”

Martyn joins fellow King Ted’s old boys Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott, DJ Toddla T, and musical funnyman Graham Fellows, alias John Shuttleworth, in the growing line-up of high-profile supporters of the Hands Off KES campaign.

The last local authority-maintained secondary in Sheffield was rated ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted last September, despite being the second-best performing school in all of Yorkshire for Oxbridge admissions.

Martyn, who grew up in Burngreave and Broomhall and now lives in Marylebone, London, said he views the academy system – where schools are removed from local authority control and run instead by ‘trusts’ – as both ‘asset-stripping’, and ‘brain washing’.

Academy trusts can decide their own curriculum, put in place their own board of governors or none, and set teachers’ pay, terms and conditions – whilst academy CEOs can pay themselves salaries of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Martyn attended KES in the late 1960s and remembers it being a ‘daunting’ and ‘old-fashioned’ school, where he was caned by one teacher and injured by another who threw a blackboard rubber at his head. He left halfway through the first year of his A Levels.

But he said he was inspired by music teacher Norman Barnes, who held ‘music appreciation lessons’ and encouraged children to bring in their own records from home, play them for the class, and explain why they liked them.

In a blistering attack on the academy system and the Tories, the 67-year-old said: “Education should not be regarded as some sort of profit centre for capitalist bosses. Education should be funded by the state for the people.

“I’m a socialist, I make no bones about it, I always have been. And to me academies are structural brain washing. The Tories want to quell rebellion, they are frightened of the power of youth and students, and academies are a way of siphoning off state assets for themselves. It’s a classic capitalist trope. They are asset-stripping schools.”

More than 500 parents attended a rally outside Sheffield City Hall in April, protesting against the Ofsted grading and the forced academisation directive.

A regrading inspection took place in May, the result of which should be published next month. A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Ofsted has revisited King Edward VII and the Regional Director will use the new information from the outcome of this inspection to inform any further decisions about transferring the school to an academy.”