SO, Education Secretary, Michael Gove visits Abingdon and cheerily tells us that: “Oxfordshire is now under a leadership that wants to put educational excellence at the heart of everything it does.”

Don’t we all, Mr Gove but Oxfordshire has in common with the rest of England the vexing problem of Gove himself and of his hit-people hired from for-profit companies such as Tribal plc, who supply inspectors for Ofsted in this part of England.

The grains of goodwill between parents and children and Gove’s raiding parties ran out long ago.

And yes, of course Gove can boot out academy sponsors and tout for new ones but touting is what it will be.

Her Majesty’s Inspector, Matthew Arnold, always stressed that inspectors and schools must cooperate and evolve together, not, as today, in the glare of confrontation and tinny sabre-rattling, which didn’t mean for Arnold that tough advice based on tough systems shouldn’t be implemented and acted upon, rather that trust on all sides was and is, a better basis for shared improvement than ill-informed condemnation.

I am tempted to say ‘Go home, Gove’, but we must be polite, mustn’t we?

And lucky Scotland doesn’t fall under Gove’s educational jurisdiction.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH Bowness Avenue Headington Oxford