Cademuir International School - non-selective intake, 70 per cent requiring teaching in English as a foreign language in order to access the curriculum effectively, 40 per cent with a record of needs, majority of pupils state-funded - achieved results which appear to compare favourably with the “dozen high achievers” table.

Only fools and HMIs - the latter could be regarded as a subset of the former at times - would attempt to compare two such different sets of pupils.

Of course, many of our suc-cesses cannot be included in conventional statistics - they pass exams in S3 not S4 or they take a couple of Highers early (S4 not S5). Where do you count a 12 year old’s grade A mathsgrade B Latin, for example?

However, let me not condemn statistics totally. Over 90 per cent of Cademuir parents are very positive about the teaching their children receive - and over 90 per cent of those children (educationally fragile, victims of earlier school bullies, rejected by state schools) go on to enter higher education from Cademuir - popular destination choices being St Andrews, Stirling, and London universities. We must be doing something right.

H M Wilson Latinmaths teacher Cademuir Castle Crescent Closeburn