But enter the Treasury building in Whitehall and you find a dark interior, dominated by wide corridors and private offices that use up space unproductively. Too many public buildings are like the Treasury’s headquarters, and too few are like DERA’s, says a recent report, and the result is lowered efficiency and reinforcement of rigid hierarchies that squash imagination and make team work impossible. Walk into the Defence and Evaluation Research Agency in Farnborough and you are in light and spacious offices that typify state-of-the-art building design. Is this what we have schools and universities for? We need to examine our aims and objectives carefully if we are to develop an education system which will serve our needs in the 21st century.Sensing the public mood, the Government is trying to be all things to all people, Yet, if the Government is really interested in education, education and education, then it needs to think, think and think!W D McKaigueThornton Hough, Wirral.

Seeing education as a race, some parents are keen to push their children to gain early advantage. Also, it is politically correct to try to help “disadvantaged” children before their poor start in life has become a handicap.However, the view of education as a race condemns everyone to failure eventually. Because these children will be relatively few in number, the help which they receive can be well-resourced and carefully targeted.Of course, the pressure to begin early is immense. Since progress feeds on success, their learning will be much more enjoyable, morale will be high and the children will go from strength to strength. The remaining children will be those with real learning difficulties. Such an approach condemns the majority to frustration and to feelings of failure. Not only does it generate a massive and costly remedial problem, it is bad for the morale of the children and may well make many of them feel that school is not for them.However, if we delay formal work for 12 months until perhaps, 80 per cent of the children are ready, then most of the children will make better progress.

To ask the Government to introduce such measures, however, is perhaps naive when the autumn parliamentary session begins so late after the long summer break that there is no government time left for discussion in the House of Commons of the Wild Mammals (Hunting with Dogs) Bill. Why should MPs and teachers (and lecturers) be the exception to the general trend of most professions working long hours with short holidays?Geoffrey MorrisDoncasterStart teaching when children are readyIn my experience, children learn best when they are good and ready. It is counter-productive to begin formal work when perhaps only 20 per cent of the pupils are ready. But if academic attainment standards are to rise, an extra week or fortnight a year would appear obvious solutions (and also help to reduce some of the juvenile crime that occurs at those times). These benefits are likely to be lifelong and the duration of the special coding would need examination.