FRAN Bardsley’s front page story, (School Pupils Go Free, September 3) on the opening of Oxfordshire’s first free school, could be a press release from Michael Gove’s Education Department.

It might be thought the Oxford Mail is a cheerleader for free schools and academies and far less enthusiastic about local authority schools. The far too frequent lack of impartiality in reporting of education in Oxfordshire is depressing and distressing.

Only recently the Oxford Mail was reporting the plight of parents who have not found places for their children in local schools this September. The closing down by Michael Gove of school building programmes in the summer of 2010 has meant many schools in Oxfordshire and beyond are struggling in and with sub-standard facilities.

The Oxford Mail is of course right to say that free schools (and academies) “are funded by the taxpayer”, at a time when “survivor” schools, that is the majority, are smarting under the lash of destructive cuts to their budgets. We are experiencing a dissolution of the state education system, at every level, which is leading not to a reformation but to a deformation.

As parents and as citizens, the people of Oxfordshire should be fighting Gove and co and not be misled by gooey coverage of free school openings, which are irrelevant to the majority of pupils in our county.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH, Bowness Avenue, Headington, Oxford