Again we have an attempt to alleviate the embarrassment of having a disaffected rump in our schools. It is to be hoped that Estelle Morris’s “graduation” scheme will work but, like past efforts to offer other kinds of success, it may largely fail.

It is academic succeeders who control the system; who join PTAs, for example. They are the ones who do the planning, but they also have an incomplete view of education.

The others are only discovered through the embarrassment they cause. At 12 or 13 they are intelligent enough to see that school has little for them. Are enough alternatives being researched? Is school, as we know it, the answer? Would real change prove too costly?

Michael Pulham
Waldron,
East Sussex