THANK you for highlighting the ‘Great Divide’ between town and gown in our city on your front page (February 2).
It is appalling that children in local schools do so poorly for lack of funding while, as you report in the same issue, the Blavatnik School of Government in Walton Street has been opened at a cost of £55m, providing a glamorous but inessential facility for 117 already privileged students.
They will be studying for a degree which ‘could help them write Government policy’. What a valuable service the new institution will perform. Meantime, local children are in desperate need of schooling – some of them cannot write at all.
Can I suggest that any new university centre of educational privilege such as the Blavatnik should be obliged to pay a sum equivalent to at least a third of its costs to the city council for local schools and early intervention centres?
JANE JAKEMAN
Merewood Avenue, Sandhills, Oxford
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