Three former education secretaries and a Labour grandee lambasted the party’s plan to undo academy school freedoms last night.

Senior MPs warned the Government’s proposals to restrict academies’ independence would ‘stamp out brilliance’ and ‘destroy’ progress made over the last decade in education.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, debated in the Commons yesterday, seeks to ensure all state schools follow the same pay and conditions framework.

Academies – which are independent of local authorities – currently have the freedom to set their own pay and conditions for staff, and some academies exceed the national pay scales for teachers.

But the new Bill would ensure all teachers will be part of the same core pay and conditions framework whether they work in a local authority-run school or an academy.

It also requires all state schools to teach the national curriculum, ends academies’ ability to hire teachers who do not have Qualified Teacher Status and stops the forced academisation of schools run by local authorities which are identified as a concern by Ofsted.

Former Conservative education secretary Michael Gove described the legislation as ‘horrifying’ – and said it would dismantle ‘brick-by-brick’ achievements in education.

He said in ‘every international measure of educational achievement, England has improved relative to other countries in the past decade or so’.

Writing in the Spectator magazine, which he edits, Mr Gove said: ‘So what does this Labour government do on inheriting this achievement? Sets out to destroy it.’

He accused Labour of worse than ‘vandalism’, saying: ‘This government is chillingly precise in seeking to destroy the policies that have contributed to giving English children the best education possible. It is Rome’s approach to Carthage – a salting of the earth.’

In the Commons, where MPs debated the Bill, Labour grandee Dame Siobhain McDonagh warned the reforms put at risk a ‘proven recipe for success’ to help pupils.

Dame Siobhain, a Blairite, said she was saddened to make a speech criticising the Bill, and highlighted concerns over the proposal to make it compulsory for academies to teach the national curriculum; the harmonisation of teachers’ pay across academies and maintained schools; and the pathway for future failing schools.

‘My contribution is borne out of 27 years’ experience. I have fought teaching unions, I have fought anti-academy groups because the most important thing is the ability of children to achieve what they can and that is not about aspiring to it, saying it’s what we want, it’s about putting the structures in place that actually bring it about. Don’t put that at risk.’

Ex-education secretary Sir Gavin Williamson said the Bill would diminish the best schools and ‘stamp out brilliance’.

The Tory explained: ‘If you look through the clauses, it doesn’t seem to be about making sure that excellence within our schooling system is actually driven forward, it seems to be about dragging the excellent down.’

And Conservative former education secretary Damian Hinds said the Bill will make it ‘as if Tony Blair had never been prime minister’.

He told the Commons: ‘I’m sure Labour MPs today will cheer what they will see as the final demise of the Gove/Gibb reforms, but what we have before us today reverses far further back than that.

‘If this Bill passes anything close to its current form, it will be as if Lord Adonis was never the schools minister, as if Lord Blunkett had never sat in the secretary of state’s chair, it will be as if Tony Blair had never been prime minister and had never made central to his pledge and contract to the British people in 1997 those famous three words, “education, education, education”.’

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told MPs that teachers will not face a pay cut under proposed education reforms as she defended the legislation in the Commons.

She said high-quality state education should be the ‘right of all children’ as she noted academies, introduced by Tony Blair’s Labour in the early 2000s and expanded by the Conservatives, have been ‘instrumental’ in raising standards.

‘They will continue their record of excellence under this Labour Government,’ she claimed.

However, Sir Daniel Moynihan, CEO of academy chain the Harris Federation, raised concerns about Labour’s plans.

He told BBC Radio 4’s The World At One: ‘If the Bill goes through in the way it is intended at the moment then academies may look very different and may be very little different from maintained schools…

‘The answer to giving maintained schools the option to perform even better is to give them academy freedoms, not to take the freedoms away from us – give those freedoms to everybody.’