IT'S hard to know where to begin to respond to David Culm's Soapbox, ''There is a ready solution which will help create employable school-leavers" (July 9).
I'm intrigued that he knows why I married my husband, though I don't understand his differentiation between "an education", and "a freely available state education".
I also do know a considerable number of university graduates very happily married to non-graduates. But a degree, though a measure of academic ability, is by no means a guarantee of overall intelligence; having graduate parents does not ensure inherited academic ability. Nurture plays a hugely important role in the development, and speed of development, of children of whatever inherited ability.
It would also be quite wrong to assume that those who choose career/employment paths other than university may be less able and ambitious, and their qualifications less valid, than those with degrees. So what is Mr Culm's reasoning?
Very many single-parent families do not depend on benefits, though since the vast majority of benefit-dependent families have one or more members in work, it is employers who pay inadequate wages rather than their underpaid employees who deserve criticism. Many single-parent families result from the death or disappearance of a spouse, as opposed to choice.
Many disruptive pupils have deeply troubled domestic backgrounds not of their own making. How could a head teacher resorting to further violence (caning) and the contemptuous ostracism of more fortunate pupils possibly ameliorate this?
Mr Culm seems to approve of separating "art-based" (what does this mean?) and "O-level" (does he mean more academic?) students. Is he seriously recommending that arts-orientated children today should have a less academic curriculum than others and somehow be educated separately from them? What would he suggest for multiply-gifted children, especially if their abilities emerge at different stages in their development?
I do not understand the proviso "before comprehensives can work..." They can and do work and have done for decades, in Derby and elsewhere. But most of them would probably at least spell my name correctly – which the Telegraph always does but which, for all his grammar school education, Mr Culm does not!
