Alleged infiltration of Birmingham schools by religious hardliners shows the need for more local oversight in education, shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt said on Saturday.

He told the NASUWT conference in Birmingham that allegations some schools in the city have imposed religious rules demonstrated “the inability of the Department for Education to run 5,000 schools from Whitehall.”

He continued: “It clearly shows the need for a new more accountable system of local oversight, especially as the existing local and regional infrastructure for monitoring schools has been so comprehensively undermined in the last four years.”