I am writing in response to the letter about Larkrise Primary School in East Oxford from Catherine Goodwin (Thursday’s Oxford Mail ViewPoints).

She says that both her sons attend Larkrise and are very happy and well educated there, and disagrees with proposed action to improve things.

I would have to disagree, even though both my children attended the school and also did well there.

The problem is that children who are helped extensively at home, as mine were, will do well, but the true test of a school is how well it educates those without help elsewhere, as I was taught many years ago.

Both my children thought Larkrise and Donnington were good schools, because they did well. I asked them if children who were in their classes all through Larkrise and Donnington did not do well. They said lots.

I said that I would have failed to learn in those schools, if we had had their teaching systems at the end of the 1950s.

The real problem with all these proposed new school models is that none of them spell out exactly how they are going to teach kids to read and write.

The reason for that is the total dependence on school classroom teaching methods that only work if pupils have lots of help at home.

Good luck to Melinda Tilley, but don’t hold your breath.

S NICHOLSON, Campbell Road, Cowley, Oxford