Views won't help us get fair deal

Lynne Rathmell, the head of Coleham School, said: "We get wonderful results at the end of the day, some of the higher results in Shropshire, but that's through dint of a lot of unpaid work and lots of parent volunteers roped in."

Really? And how do we get equally good results (and better) in our smaller schools?

By dint of all the paid servants we must have from all that money we're squandering?

Ms Rathmell, the higher cost per head of rural school children is a natural occurance of rural populations being less dense than urban populations.

In fact, it takes more shops, garages, roads and other services to serve a given number of people in the countryside than it does in a town.

According to your logic, do you think that we should abolish the entire countryside and move it all into Shrewsbury?

Of course, that same logic would dictate that Shrewsbury itself is abolished and moved into Wolverhampton or amalgamated with Telford.

Oddly enough, this is the same logic that would have this Government giving less money to rural counties than to more densely populated ones.

And yet Ms Rathmell, you concede that the Government doesn't give enough money to Shropshire.

But according to your logic, they shouldn't.

Now that's not going to get us very far in our campaign to get a fair deal for Shropshire is it?

Rob Lopez, Shrewsbury