In her excellent article on private tuition (“At home with the Blairs”, Friday, July 19) Joanna Williams concedes too much to its enemies by admitting “a case” against it.

There simply isn’t any: it’s a wholly private affair and it harms absolutely no one. On the contrary, it supports school achievement - for which the schools take the credit.

Hostility towards private tuition comes from politically-motivated commentators who intensely dislike individual initiative and would like to see tuition (like everything else) brought under some system of control.

Failing that, they continually misrepresent it as a case of pushy parents trying merely to “buy in” to advantage.

Untrue, in my considerable experience. Parents fall into two classes: those who really do, and those who really don’t, want the tuition.

A “don’t” would be the louche type in your Breakdown cartoon, preoccupied with cost. But the “dos” are much in the majority and show an extremely heartening commitment and trust over long periods.

Parents are, I believe, very uneasy about school standards, despite official assurances of quality. Their efforts to do something positive about this ought surely to be applauded rather than denigrated.

Nigel Probert 15B South Snowdon Wharf Porthmadog.