Sir – So here we go again, on the roulette wheel of Key Stage (Two) Results (Report, December 22) and shoddy judgements about primary schools in Oxford city.

Rather than indulge in semi-literate comments, it might be useful if Melinda Tilley, Oxfordshire County Council cabinet member for school improvements, could prepare a position paper on the value or otherwise of the Key Stages, of the assessment system, and show real support for those schools she seems so keen to condemn.

She says she is “very disappointed with Oxford city’s results”, declaring them “basically rubbish” , by which it could be adduced that Oxford’s primary heads, teachers, auxiliary staff, and parents, are the creators of Mrs Tilley’s educational “rubbish”.

One of the seven city schools which is cited as having failed to meet Government targets of 60 per cent of pupils achieving Level 4 in English and maths is St Nicholas’ Primary School, Old Marston, at which two of my four children are former pupils and my fourth and youngest is still a pupil.

St Nicholas’ is also home to the Chinnor Unit, whose pupils don’t take SATS and yet whose numbers have been counted in to the St Nicholas’ statistics, which are thereby distorted and meaningless. A school’s reputation must not depend on pernicious and meaningless “league tables”.

Education correspondent Fran Bardsley correctly reports that the Department of Education can compel St Nicholas and the other schools listed (city and county) to become sponsored academies, which is what the ideologically-driven Education Secretary Michael Gove favours, based on the spuriousness of crude bureaucratic assessment and not on what schools are and can be.

Education deserves better. Oxfordshire’s children and families deserve better. The excellent St Nicholas’ Primary deserves better. And then, at last and all together, we might be able to climb Thomas Huxley’s ladder of opportunity.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Headington