Governing bodies at primary schools with consistently poor results may be replaced or forced to merge with the boards of stronger schools in the area.
Such schools would be run by a single governing body and head teacher, and staff would move between the two schools, although they would continue to operate as separate institutions.
Schools under the greatest pressure to make changes will be those where fewer than 55 per cent of children aged 11 fail to achieve a Level 4 score in national curriculum tests.
League tables of results published this week showed that there were 1,472 such schools last year, an increase of 113 on the previous year.
The proportion of children at all schools achieving the basic pass in English fell from 81 to 80 per cent last year, making it harder for the Government to reach its target of 78 per cent of children reaching Level 4 in both English and maths within two years. The current figure is 72 per cent.
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Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, announced yesterday that he wanted a “fresh approach to raising standards in primary schools” and told local authorities to identify their weaker schools and strong schools that could work in partnership with them.
Weak schools are classed as those served with a notice to improve or placed in special measures by Ofsted, where children’s progress in primary school is below average and whose results are inconsistent, as well as those at which just over half fail to grasp basic English and maths.
Mr Balls has also written to 12 local authorities which have the highest proportion of schools whose English and maths results have fallen below this threshhold for four years or more, asking them to show him plans by next month on how they will improve their performance.
He refused to name the authorities, saying only that they were predominantly in urban areas, and controlled by different political parties. If these councils fail to act, he has powers to send in advisers to force through changes.
Mr Balls’s announcement has echoes of his intervention to improve exam results in secondary schools, where initially 637 schools had fewer than 30 per cent of pupils achieving five good GCSEs of A* to C. They were threatened with takeover or closure.
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He also intervened in several local authorities, including Gloucestershire, Milton Keynes, Blackpool, which he said had not acted decisively enough to raise standards.
But Mr Balls said primary schools required a different approach given their greater number and greater fluctuation between year groups, and said his emphasis would be on local interventions.