SO “Banbury Academy will have prospective pupils sit a test” and “Wallingford School will give more priority to staff children” (February 11).

Fine, dandy. And just the beginning of the kind of life-wounding divisions which were commonplace in the wretched days when the 11+ operated in Oxfordshire.

Yet county council cabinet member for education Melinda Tilley has nothing to say on this beyond offering her support for Govite academisation and the right for academies to “set admissions”.

No concerns, then, about selection and a return to a potentially discriminatory admissions process? No notion of equal opportunity? No concern for all of Oxforshire’s state-educated pupils, present and future?

Mrs Tilley appears to live without doubts and be proud of her dogmas. At a ‘Question Time’ at The Cherwell School last Friday, reported Oxford Mail (February 12), arranged and chaired by Year 9 student Greg Holyoak and attended by my Year 11 daughter and some of her friends, Mrs Tilley declared to my daughter that (anthropogenic) climate change “doesn’t exist” and to one of my daughter’s friends that there is “no poverty” in today’s Britain.

My daughter returned home distressed by what she and her citizenship classmates had interpreted as an offensive mix of arrogance and ignorance on Mrs Tilley’s part. There’s more that could and should be said about this but deaf ears come to mind!

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH, Bowness Avenue, Headington