Stick to the facts

SIR – Professor Geraint Johnes’s research – suggesting that schools where 20 per cent or more of pupils come from poor backgrounds see lower attainment overall (report, June 3) – should occasion no surprise.

Educators noticed the same phenomenon in America in the Eighties. William Bennett, education secretary in the Reagan administration, championed a renewed emphasis on teaching facts in schools as the only way to redress the balance and give kids from poorer backgrounds a fair chance.

Over the last 30 years, successive administrations and state governments have continued with this, with the results noted by Professor Johnes. In Britain, however, the educational establishment is wedded to the idea that it is wrong to emphasise factual knowledge, relying instead on a mish-mash of discredited theories about the human brain and how we learn. Our students, and indeed our whole society, pay the price in staggering percentages of illiteracy, innumeracy and unemployability. And it is the poorest who suffer. David Paul

Trustee, Turn Around Orpington, Kent