- guardian.co.uk, Friday September 17 1999 17.51 BST
I became depressed by the link between "brightness" and class underlying Davies's discussion. Coming from a disadvantaged or less "well motivated" background does not make children less bright, it just lessens their chance of being given the opportunity to shine. Unless research like this uncouples "bright" and middle-class, then it is merely perpetuating a dangerous fallacy that intelligence is the property of a particular class. Now that truly is a "bias that killed the dream of equality".
Jan Flaherty
Loughborough, Leics
• As the mother of a child at a state junior school and as the chair of the governing body at a state infant school, I some times wonder if I live in a parallel universe, where children from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds are stimulated and educated with a breadth and vision which many public schools could never hope to emulate (I know, I went to three, plus a state school for my A-levels). Please take a look at the big picture and avoid picking off easy targets in a way that reinforces prejudices and eclipses the passion and enthusiasm that does exist in state schools.
Anne Caborn
Brighton, E Sussex
• Headteacher Sarah Draper asserts that "education is a middle-class value" (Schools in Crisis, September 14). Is it any wonder that so many of her pupils skipped school to watch the football if they are supposedly led to believe, through inference or otherwise, that the working-class has never been much interested in learning? There was a time when "self-help" meant something different from helping yourself. And in the west London comprehensive where I work it still does, unless my industrious students have become bourgeois by virtue of getting their homework done last night.
Adam Bush
Greenford, Middx
• Carol Taylor (Letters, September 15) suggests Nick Davies will put off possible recruits into teaching. I don't believe it. If I were 20 again with plenty of moral spunk and political passion, I might well want to join the Abbeydale Grange teachers. Davies tells us of the successes they bring off against the odds set by the devastation of the community the school serves. But I'd run a mile from a recruiting officer luring me into schools that in Taylor's words "consistently succeed against a wide range of criteria..."
Jim Pye
Oxford
• Asked why she was not at school the other day, my granddaughter informed me it was a "Baker day" at school. A chilling legacy which sets the noble lord's name flowing from the lips of an innocent child as yet unaware of the mayhem he set in train.
Anne Caborn
Sleaford, Lincs
