Sir – Your article (County schools are singled out for criticism in Ofsted’s report, November 29) highlighted the Ofsted chief inspector’s observation that ‘Oxfordshire is among the 20 per cent of (English) local authority areas with the lowest proportion of pupils attending good or better primary schools’. It is instructive to compare Oxfordshire’s current education priorities with those of the local authority that came at the very top of Ofsted’s league table.

A letter in the Guardian on the day following your article, from the chair of the Chairs’ and Governors’ Association in the London borough of Camden, noted that ‘the “Camden model” is based on the recognition that schools thrive not by making themselves independent of the local education authority, but by being part of a “family of schools” that works closely with the LEA: a partnership that is based on mutual challenge, not on control from the centre .... In Camden there are hardly any academies and free schools.” I am sure most heads, teachers and governors in Oxfordshire would look upon this view as a welcome breath of fresh air, a visionary antidote to the county’s divisive ‘drive to encourage Free Schools and to convert (maintained) schools to Academy status’, reiterated by the cabinet in July. Councillor Tilley is all too correct in admitting that the county still has ‘much more work to do’ but is Oxfordshire’s education leadership not barking up the wrong tree in seeking (unlike Camden) to create more and more academies?

Were councillor Tilley to visit Camden and talk to education leaders there, she might come away with some better, more professional solutions that could improve outcomes in Oxfordshire more effectively than the policies seemingly urged upon her by the Prime Minister’s party machine.

Robin Gill, Headington