* Children from ethnically-diverse backgrounds have not “bought into a white, middle-class perspective of inner-city schooling” as Dr Diane Reay and Dr Helen Lucey of King’s College, London, claim (“Pupils turn their backs on their own social groups”, TES, March 16).
I am a governor of a school a mile from where Damilola Taylor was murdered. Ethnic-minority parents tll us they want their children to go to a school where there are as many white children as black because they want them out of the gang culture prevalent in their communities.
This is not a classist or racist attitude, as Reay and Lucey argue, but mums and dads and young boys dealing with reality.
Heather Nicholson
St Mary’s Road
London SE15
