I WISH Steve Harrod every success in his new role as Cabinet member for Education (‘Education chief working on a formula for success’, November 22).

Mr Harrod refers to the challenge of “providing support… especially where poor standards are letting pupils down”.

Has anyone wondered why state education in the UK has been striving to shake off poor standards for decades without quite getting there?

Standards in the UK are still struggling at the bottom of globalleague tables, and have been for years.

We are regularly told that schools are improving and “raising standards”. But why isn’t education already ‘improved’?

One report that goes a long way to explaining the dismal standards in too many state schools, can be found at “educationconcerns.org”.

The selective system ensures that children are taught in matched ability classes – like-with-like – while the comprehensive system prefers mixed ability classes.

It is an impractical nonsense to expect children to learn (and teachers to teach) in the mixed ability class, where disparate groups means that the teacher (and LSA) can only teach one group at a time for just a few minutes of the lesson while leaving the others to fend for themselves.

A matched ability class means that the whole class can be taught by the one teacher for the whole lesson, with everyone actively involved in the same learning process at a pace they are comfortable with.

Perhaps a healthy compromise is a cross between the selective and comprehensive systems, with pupils in a small comprehensive school organised like-with-like in matched ability sets – plus the essential ingredient of incorporating direct liaison between the secondary sector and the feeder schools in the primary sector.

ROGER GRIFFIN

Thame