Tom Ogg -

No, I don't think so. Read my comment immediately below yours in the forum.

I don't think many aspiring middle-class families were drawn to move to NI during the troubles - quite the reverse; those with talent and saleable skills tended to move out.

Anyway why do you assume that middle-class children (who I agree will often be better taught in the pre-school years) are inevitably more talented than those from the lower classes? This is an assumption the 11+, with its emphasis on IQ tests rather than attainment tests, explicitly discounted.

The social and intellectual snobbery of the liberal left never stops astounding me, though by this time I should have got used to it.

Michael Bruce, Selby, Yorkshire

Overall attainment is higher in grammar school areas firstly because the middle classes are attracted to the concentration of advantage that grammar schools represent; because grammar schools only continue to in that area because those areas are more middle class people (who defend grammar schools). So Graham Brady's figures don't say anything except what we already knew: the middle classes are attracted to highly performing state schools.

Tom Ogg, Oxford,

That the grammar school/modern system outperforms the comprehensive system has been known (known, not guessed) for decades. Northern Ireland was not reorganised at the same time as England. In the period following reorganisation, despite the acute problems of that province, the overall results there were better than in England. It is not so much that grammar schools "give a lift" to anyone else as that the selective system caters better for all levels of academic aptitude and ability.

The comprehensive revolution was driven partly by parsimony (per pupil, they are cheaper to run), and partly by the wish to "keep talent in the working-class": in other words, by the desire of a generation of Labour politicians which had risen through the grammar schools to "pull up the ladder" and protect their own privately-educated children from working-class competition.

The results are visible today.

Michael Bruce, Selby, Yorkshire

In the late 1970s, a few years after leaving my old grammar school, by now an apparently thriving comprehensive, I visited it to see how a good comprehensive school worked.

It was all most impressive, but one of my former teachers commented, "You know, we fail the very children this was supposed to be for: the average ones. Under the old system, either they'd have been in the lower stream of the grammar school, and being constantly encouraged to keep up, or else they'd have been in one of the upper stream classes at the secondary modern, and feeling pretty good about themselves. Here, they're just the grey ones in the middle.

"The ablest still do vey well," she went on, "probably as well as you and your contemporaries, though they don't get as much help. And the ones at the bottom get an enormous amount of all our resources, because they're so much trouble if they don't. But we can't help feeling that it's all at the expense of the average children in the middle."

Gill, Southampton, UK

This confirms a point I tried to make a few days ago. Educational policy in this country is made primarily by people who have an Arts background and who think that debate is the rational way to create policy.

As soon as you have empirical data, however, you quickly discover that the policy is wrong and that those who were successful in debate were those who employed cleverly fallacious arguments, or who were sufficiently intellectually unscrupulous.

We should not be surprised by this. Philosophical debate led to one picture of the Cosmos which survived for centuries, and then Galileo looked through a telescope and swept it all away in minutes, simply by observing the facts.

jon livesey, Sunnyvale, CA/US