We have been staggered by the poor organisation of our daughter’s GCSE exam timetable. She will be facing a number of exams on the same day. On one day she is due to sit four exams, totalling seven hours. Is it impossible for the exam boards to provide timetabling schedules that don’t overlap?

Belinda Holmes, London

The examination boards do try to coordinate the timetabling of exams. In your daughter’s case they seem to have failed. I would be interested to hear from other readers whose children face an unreasonable number of exams on one day.

I went to private school in the 1960s and as I wanted to do a biological sciences degree I was advised to take maths and chemistry at A-level, which I duly did. My daughter, in her first year of the same degree, wishes she’d been advised to study maths and chemistry at A-level: she struggles with these modules in her degree. What are your views on the freer choice now at A-level, which can lead to students choosing easier subjects – at the expense of not being well prepared for their degree courses?

Jenny Sparks, Surrey

You raise a serious issue: 30.8% of the candidates and 42.7% of the A grades in A-level maths in 2006 came from the 7% of students attending private schools. The subject is dying in the state sector. The problem is in part that students left too much to their own devices choose easier subjects. It is also that there are too few specialist maths and science teachers in state schools.

The Easter holiday weekend this year fell just four days before the end of term, which seems daft and disruptive. If we are to have terms of equal length, which I think is a good idea, would it not now be sensible to decouple the bank holiday from the actual, variable date of Easter, and fix it as, say, the second weekend in April, which would then fall in the scheduled school holidays?

Norman Wells, Essex

I am not persuaded that you need terms of equal length. Good schools teach up until the last day, however long the term. Bad ones abandon serious work whenever a holiday looms. Irrespective of the length of term, decoupling the bank holiday from the Easter weekend would upset everyone who looks forward to a four-day break. Given that Easter will not be this early again until 2228, it seems an unnecessarily drastic step.

Chris Woodhead is a former chief inspector of schools and now chairman of the private schools group Cognita. If you have a question for him, please write to him c/o The Sunday Times, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1ST or e-mail him, with your name and address, at education-questions@sunday-times.co.uk

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