YOUR report (Oxford Mail, January 19) on Cherwell School’s decision to become an academy in what appears to be a gold-rush, which in fact may offer little more than fool’s gold – Government documents make it clear that there must not be any “financial advantage or disadvantage” for schools which, by choice or by force, become academies – necessarily lacked any historical perspective.

Yet those who believed in the comprehensive principle should not be written out of history. As that most gifted and humane of sociologists, Prof Peter Townsend, wrote in 1965, the move to comprehensive and the end of the pernicious and socially destructive 11-plus would offer “at least... a minimum fulfilment of the principle of equality of educational opportunity and a corporate social unity which may even spill over into adult life”.

As early as 1947 the Ministry of Education defined the comprehensive as a “school intended to cater for all the secondary education of all the children in a given area without an organisation on three sides”, that is without separate grammar, secondary modern and technical departments.

Cherwell, which opened as a secondary modern, has been and is a successful comprehensive school and it must be hoped that the educational voices of Oxford and Oxfordshire chief education officers, such as Alan Chorlton, John Dorrell, and John Garne, will not be drowned out by the hysteria of a hyperactive Michael Gove.

As Prof Harry Judge wrote in his obituary of John Dorrell (The Guardian, April 1, 2002), “chief education officers were national figures and thinkers in their own right”.

So, as we are being ramrodded into a trifurcated state secondary education system, with local authority schools, academies and free schools and university technical colleges, spare a thought for what local education authorities achieved, for there is still much to learn from those achievements.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH Bowness Avenue Headington Oxford