Sir – Dr Daniel Emlyn-Jones is of course right (Letters, February 17) to stress that secondary schools, whether state or private, are about much more than Oxbridge places.

My self-indulgent letter (February 3) about my two older sons and Oxford and Cambridge was intended to remind people that the often beleaguered state secondary schools are in all sorts of ways ‘excellent’, academically, vocationally, socially and culturally, as are their primary ‘feeders’.

I should also have mentioned the vital place in British education of sixth-form colleges and colleges of further education, the latter the least understood, yet most diverse providers of academic and vocational education for British 16-19 year-olds. The final sentence of Dr Emlyn-Jones’ letter is, however, worrying: in terms of schools being places “where confidence and identity are nurtured”, he writes “From this broader perspective, I am yet to be convinced that Oxford’s state schools can rival the private sector”.

In an ideal world, schools state and private would complement one another; in the real world fee-funded selective private/independent schools exist in a different universe to schools in the state sector. In an ideal world, levels of provision for the privately/independently educated pupil would be matched by an equivalent provision for the state-educated pupil; in the real world, this can never be the case.

In his 1941 essay, The English Revolution, old-Etonian George Orwell advocated the “abolishing of the autonomy of the public schools”.

Whether, 70 years on, Orwell from beyond the grave would still propose this, is doubtful, but he would surely argue for greater support (social, cultural, as well as material) for the state sector in which most people have been, are, and will be educated.

Not rivalry, then, rather co-operation and the sharing of resources between private and state, which to an extent already happens here in Oxford, should be the educational order of the day.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Headington