A leading private school headteacher has revealed he has been repeatedly turned down for jobs in state schools.

Anthony Seldon, the headteacher of Brighton College and the unofficial biographer of Tony Blair, revealed he unsuccessfully tried to move from a private school to a state school as a classroom teacher early in his career.

Since then, he has applied for deputy head and headteacher posts at two unnamed state schools but was turned down, he told the Times Education Supplement this week.

Dr Seldon once asked at an interview for a state school job whether he was at a disadvantage coming from the private sector.

He said: "I was told: No comment.'

"There were obviously better candidates but I would not underestimate the degree of difficulty one has transferring between the two sectors.

"The apartheid that exists between the state and independent sector is deeply unhelpful.

"The Government has done good work but it should have done much more."

Dr Seldon, who will take over at the £21,900-a-year Wellington College near Crowthorne in Berkshire in January, also tried to set up a job exchange between Brighton College and a state school but the idea was shelved.

Dr Seldon said: "I was told the level of bureaucracy would prohibit it."

Last year, Tristram Jones-Parry, formerly head of Westminster School, an independent school in London, was refused work in a state school because he did not have qualified teacher status.

But Dr Seldon, 52, is a qualified teacher and holds an outstanding teacher award from Kings College London.

Dr Seldon has a reputation for speaking out over education matters and called for a change to A-level exams earlier this year, branding the current system boring, monotonous and anti-intellectual.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph in August he said:

"(A-level) no longer prepares them properly in key subjects because it has become such a mechanical exam.

"It breaks up subjects into bite-sized pieces, does not test what really matters and allows candidates to retake modules until they achieve the desired result."

He has called for a new exam for 16 to 19-year-olds based on the best parts of A-levels and the International Baccalaureate.

He has also backed Government plans to give boarding school places to pupils expelled from comprehensives so long as they were "young enough and capable of responding positively".