Sir – The Prime Minister wonders why not one of the secondaries in his home county does as well as two academies he highlights in central London. No one provides a satisfactory local explanation.

The provisional GCSE results are published, showing Oxfordshire slipping in comparison to national and similar-authority measures. No one steps forward to reassure us that the right feet are being held to the fire.

What we do see is: that boys are blamed for falling levels of performance at GCSE; our secondaries are urged by the councillor responsible for school improvement to exit the council; and, suggested by the headteacher at our only girls’ school, that in fact, single-sex schooling would be better for all. There is no recovery plan presented to show how our young people will become better able to compete with their peers around the country, the councillor encourages schools to ‘do better in the face of very disappointing results’, even while advising those schools to have even less to do with her, the Governors’ Association is silent, the lead officer likewise, and the chairman of the local Association of Secondary Head Teachers has seeming nothing to say at all.

If my son doesn’t do as well as he was thought capable in his GCSEs, there’ll be a difficult conversation over breakfast, some petty sanction applied by over-anxious parents, a re-sit or two considered and a period of long faces. If his peers across the county under-achieve, I am afraid each family blaming their own simply won’t do.

Even those who voted in Surrey Heath to return Michael Gove as their MP did not, I am sure, expect him to be directly accountable for individual school performance across the country.

I suggest a pressing local need for collective leadership on this issue.

Peter Martin, Bampton