Sir – Your front page article of May 2 reports the head of Magdalen School as criticising Education Secretary Michael Gove for reforming education for political rather than educational reasons, and by so doing damaging children’s education both in the public and private sectors.

We have a current and very pertinent local example.

At the March meeting of the city east area planning committee, a planning application for a ‘free school’ on the site of the old Lord Nuffield Social Club and adjacent sports field, in Barracks Lane, was refused on the grounds of concerns about traffic and because the site area proposed is grossly undersized.

In passing, a free school is free from the control and influence of the local education authority. The proposed school site is .59 Ha by comparison to the local education authority’s normal site area for a two-form entry primary school — 2.22 Ha — including a playing field. In other words, the new school would have a site area of barely a quarter of the normal standard.

Not only was it proposed that there be no playing field, but the tarmacked playground was also to be substandard — in a school with more than 400 pupils.

The adjacent sports field, it was proposed, would be developed for housing — on the site of what could and should be the school playing field.

Mr Gove disliked the planning refusal, and trotted along the Whitehall corridor to the office of Eric Pickles — Environment Secretary, no less, and persuaded him to call in the application — to be decided in Whitehall and not in Oxford. My money is on a rapid approval by Mr Pickles of a substandard school — contrary to all the talk about more sport following the Olympics, and the claims that localism will return more decisions to the localities affected.

Mike Gotch, City councillor, Wolvercote