The schools white paper published last autumn, had promised to give schools and councils freedom to set their own school improvement priorities.
But Education Secretary Michael Gove wrote to local authorities earlier this month, giving them six weeks to draw up detailed plans on raising standards at underperforming schools.
Nick Hudson, chair of the ADCS educational achievement policy committee, said that the government now risks recreating a top-down system for school improvement.
"These improvement plans will be submitted to the Department for Education (DfE) and then new centrally recruited school improvement advisers will come out and talk to us," he explained. "The issue for the ADCS is that the advisers will feel like the resurrection of a field force and the plan feels like an added burden.
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