MEMBERS of the country's biggest teaching union are vowing to boycott jobs in Blackburn with Darwen in support of staff at the doomed Queen's Park Technology College.

Local representatives of the NUT said they had been inundated with messages of support from union branches across the UK since the shock announcement last week that the council planned to shut the struggling high school next year.

The threat could have massive repercussions on Blackburn with Darwen Council, an authority which has battled to reduce its teacher vacancy levels.

In 2002, after the Government revealed the area had one of the highest vacancy levels in the country - 2.7 per cent of posts weren't filled, compared to a national average of about 0.6 per cent - extra cash was given to support recruitment.

Latest figures show that cash helped drop vacancy levels to 0.3 per cent, but that rose to 0.4 per cent this year. Queen's Park will close at the end of the spring term and be replaced by a new school in the same buildings and with same pupils in time for the start of the summer term.

Teachers at Queen's Park will have to apply for jobs at the new school, but council bosses expect them to face competition from teachers nationally after they decided to advertise all posts across the UK.

But Simon Jones, NUT spokesman for Blackburn with Darwen, said: "We have had many messages from branches across the country saying not only will their members not be applying for the ones at the new Queen's Park, but they will be ignoring Blackburn with Darwen altogether.

"This authority already has a reputation for being a tough one, and this has put people off in the past, especially people from schools in the rest of Lancashire.

"Teachers are now contacting us, having heard what is happening at Queen's Park and saying they would never work for an authority which is prepared to make teachers scapegoats like this.

"There is a lot of anger about this nationally."

Queen's Park was put in special measures by Government inspectors earlier this year, and the decision to close the school was made after a follow-up inspection revealed there had been little improvement at the school.

The school returned one of the worst sets of GCSE results in the country, with just 11per cent gaining five or more GCSEs grade A*-C.

Coun Dave Hollings, executive member for education at the council, said: "I am confident that by advertising nationally we can attract enthusiastic teachers determined to make the new school, with its new curriculum and ethos, a success."