Not so simple

In his letter of 3 April, David Hogg criticises local authorities’ responses to league tables as “simplistic” but his points are simplistic in the extreme.

He confuses subject knowledge with the ability to teach. Einstein, Shakespeare and Rembrandt may have been geniuses but could they teach their subjects to a class of 30 14-year-olds with their minds on social media and computer games? Who knows?

His reference to “state schools” implies that private schools’ looser recruitment criteria is an advantage. The fact that most private school pupils’ access to private tutors on top of the teaching they receive at their expensive schools may have more to do with exam success than he would care to admit.

League tables are not just a “test of teachers” but a reflection of the social background of the schools’ catchment. Such simplistic criticisms of state schools displays a complete failure to understand the bigger picture – something league tables and such uninformed opinions only exacerbate. D MITCHELL

The Glebe Cramond, Edinburgh never more so than in relation to separatist campaigns.

The Catalan independence movement has sought to claim the moral high ground in rejecting the right of the government of Spain to require their leadership to answer for their actions in front of a Spanish court.

In their letter the leading Spanish academics refer to how Clara Ponsati and her then Catalan government colleagues organised last year’s illegal referendum. In so doing they breached the laws of both Spain and Catalonia. This knowingly pitched their supporters into a stand-off with the Spanish police, but they have since sought to lay all the blame on heavy-handed police action.

While arguably it does little good for the health of Catalonia, or Spain as a whole, to put politicians into prison, both sides need to respect the law, and those in breach of it need to be prepared to take the consequences. Separatists who cannot get their own way by legal means step beyond the usual bounds of democratic processes when they pursue illegal avenues. It is then all too easy for the different sides to find themselves in the kind of political maelstrom out of which claims of moral superiority from any can sound somewhat hollow.

KEITH HOWELL White Moss, West Linton

Peeblesshire