Campaigners have fired the opening shots in their bid to prevent Peers School being turned into the city's first flagship academy.

A newly-formed group, the Oxford Anti-Academy Alliance (AAA), has been staging meetings this week aimed at raising awareness of the 'pitfalls' of academies.

On Tuesday night, about 50 people gathered at Rose Hill Community Centre to hear three speakers spell out the dangers of closing Peers and reopening it as the Oxford Academy. Another meeting is being held tomorrow (Thursday) at Blackbird Leys Community Centre.

The main sponsor in the £30m academy project would be the Diocese of Oxford, with co-sponsors including Oxford Brookes University, Oxford and Cherwell Valley College and BMW. If plans are approved, the academy could open in September 2008.

Andrew Baisley, a member of the national AAA group, told the meeting that allowing the plans to go through would amount to "selling the family silver".

It is understood that the Diocese of Oxford would gain 100 per cent control of the school, including issues such as appointing staff and governors and controlling intake, in exchange for eight per cent of the building and refurbishing spend.

Mr Baisley said: "The academy would not be bound by education law, which is really very scary. Parents would have no one to appeal to if things went wrong.

"The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) would have a contract with the sponsor on how the school is run and there are fears the sponsor could easily push the DfES around."

Ian Jones, a teacher at Peers School for 27 years and an officer of the teaching union NASUWT, said: "Peers has had its difficulties and it needs a lot of investment. But at the moment it's a local authority school, run by parents and governors, who direct what the school does.

"The academy would own the buildings, control the curriculum and would also appoint the governors and the staff and refuse local children places if it wanted to."

But once the meeting was thrown open to the public, Peers headteacher Lorna Caldicott leapt to the defence of the academy proposals.

She said: "These plans are just what we need if you want a new building instead of working in an absolute dump.

"My concern is giving the children of Peers a decent opportunity to get a state of the art facility which right now they couldn't even imagine."

Parent Sue James, of Littlemore, whose 14-year-old daughter Kirsty is a pupil at Peers, attended the meeting, but said she left feeling even more bewildered by the plans than when she arrived.

She added: "I have a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about what impact this could have on my daughter, but none of them seem to have been answered yet."