Three Bradford schools were today branded "immoral" for sitting on more than a million pounds of taxpayers' money.

The three secondary schools should use the cash to employ more teachers and improve standards of education, say unions.

In the latest figures, which relate to the 1999-2000 financial year, Laisterdyke High School had £477,319 in the bank, Oakbank School at Keighley £424,130, and Hanson School in Bradford, £280,865, according to the NASUWT teaching union.

Laisterdyke's riches - a nest egg of nearly half a million pounds - make it the 22nd wealthiest school in the country.

Union campaigners say school bosses should spend the cash on children's education rather than sitting on it.

And they want a better, transparent system of school funding to iron out inequalities which see some inner city schools struggling with debt and others well off.

But the schools have hit back saying the money was due to prudent financial management and had been saved for major improvement schemes.

Ian Davey, of the Bradford branch of the NASUWT, said: "It's immoral - what are they going to do with this money? They should employ more teachers, or spend the money another way on something educational. By employing more staff, they could improve education in these schools. They can obviously afford it."

He said all three schools are previous grant maintained schools (now known as Foundation Schools) which opted out of local authority control.

Today, the chairman of governors at Laisterdyke, Jaswinder Singh Shergill, said he believed the amount of cash reserves had reduced in the past two years, but he could not give the up-to-date figure. He said the money was saved up deliberately for new equipment to fit out a £5 million extension, added under the schools reorganisation programme.

"We worked hard to save up that money, other schools have debts," he said. "It's a sign of our good management. The money has been earmarked for years and the proper authorities were aware of what we were doing."

Chairman of the governors at Oakbank School Peter Scarbor-ough said: "I was never conscious of that amount of money being available. It might be that it was committed to something, but not yet spent."

Head teacher John Roberts was unavailable for comment.

At Hanson School, head teacher Tony Thorne confirmed the figure and said his school's surplus was even bigger during 2000-2001.

"We were saving money up, which we have now spent on the library extension," he said.

"I think a number of schools built up money during the grant-maintained days, but were waiting to spend it at the right time, after re-organisation."

The NASUWT union says three quarters of a billion pounds is held in schools' reserves nationally. "This money has come from tax payers' pockets to pay for a high quality education service," said Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary.

"It is appalling some schools can sit on millions of pounds of cash, when some areas desperately need more money. There can be no justification for schools with surplus cash not to offer new recruits or existing staff decent wages."

A spokesman for Education Bradford said schools have delegated budgets and it is up to individual schools how they spend it.

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, condemned the NASUWT's figures as 'crude and misleading'. "The NASUWT's attempt to name and shame individual primary and secondary schools in terms of unspent balances adopts the worst aspects of the Government's own league tables approach," he said. "Has the NASUWT bothered to find out why each of these schools have these sums unspent?"