A TROUBLED North-East city academy is an "odd case of failure" that must not deflect from the overall success of the privately-funded schools, Tony Blair insisted yesterday.

In a defiant speech, the Prime Minister said "parent power" - which meant the first wave of controversial new-style schools were over-subscribed - proved their popularity.

And he suggested the media had exaggerated the significance of Unity City Academy, in Middlesbrough, failing its Ofsted inspection earlier this year.

That failure was a major embarrassment to the Government, which had pledged the driving force of private-sector sponsorship would improve school performance.

Unity became the first of the 17 flagship academies open at the end of the last school year to fail, plunging the school into special measures.

But, without mentioning Unity by name, Mr Blair insisted the blow was a blip that would not prevent the government meeting its target of creating 200 academies by 2010.

He said: "The test of their success will not come in media stories about the odd case of failure (and, incidentally, such stories could be written, but rarely are, about the non-academy failures).

"It will come in the list of parents trying to get into school."

Critics of the academy programme have highlighted how the private sponsors can dictate the curriculum and appoint the governors while providing only eight per cent of the £25m cost.

The King's Academy, also in Middlesbrough, is run by Wearside car dealer and evangelical Christian Sir Peter Vardy.

Pupils are taught "creationist" theories that the world was made in only seven days.

But, speaking at a South London academy, Mr Blair insisted academies would create "fairness and opportunity for all" by ending the middle-class stranglehold on places at the best state schools.

He said: "Let's be brutally honest here. In schooling, the better-off do have choice and power over the system.

"They can send their children to a range of independent, fee-paying schools which, by and large, provide excellent education.

"Or they can move house to be next to the best state schools. Or they can buy private tuition.

"But for a middle or lower income family, whose local school is the option and which is underperforming, there is nothing they can do, except take what they are given."

Mr Blair said that, in the last academic year, the proportion of pupils gaining five good GCSEs rose by eight per cent in academies, four times the national average.

And he added: "Let nobody say that academies are not helping the poorest children, when a third of those attending this school receive free school meals, more than twice the national average."

But the Prime Minister's speech came as former Education Secretary Estelle Morris joined criticism of the academy initiative, accusing ministers of "serial meddling" in education.

Ms Morris asked: "In five years' time, whose children will be going to these new academies?

"Will choice and market forces once again squeeze out the children of the disadvantaged?"

Mr Blair also promised an education consultation paper next month, which will propose stripping local education authorities of the role as direct providers of state schooling.