Sir – Councillor Waine is right to highlight per-pupil differences in Government funding as one factor explaining why Oxford city primary schoolchildren progress less well on average than their counterparts in Tower Hamlets (Disadvantaged city pupils are lagging behind, March 3).

Yet some Oxford city primary schools have historically been poorly provided for by the county’s own delegation formula (through which funding is distributed to its schools).

In recent years, Oxfordshire has been receiving almost £20m per year from government to spend on meeting needs arising from deprivation, yet less than £800,000 per year of deprivation funding has actually been targeted by the county council specifically into schools serving the county’s most disadvantaged areas (on the SE fringes of Oxford, in parts of Banbury and in Berinsfield).

The local authority’s failure to resource such schools adequately to meet the substantial pressures they face was criticized by Ofsted in its annual performance assessment for Oxfordshire in 2008. To its credit the local authority is currently reviewing the deprivation and Special Educational Needs elements of its funding formula.

Nonetheless there is a real danger that, with the introduction of the Government’s Pupil Premium (welcome though this is), the county council’s own responsibility to delegate sufficient Government funding to schools serving the most disadvataged communities will be quietly overlooked.

As part of its review, the authority needs to ensure that current funding streams (separate from the pupil premium) are properly delegated in line with Government intentions on deprivation, which it has sadly neglected to do in the past.

Not to do so risks widening still further the gap in performance (and in children’s prospects) between city schools and their counterparts in Tower Hamlets.

Robin Gill, Headington