ADVICE to provide schools in poorer wards with extra staff, homework clubs and other resources is teaching grandma to suck eggs.

Is Nicole Ivanoff (Your Letters, Christmas Issue) willing to pay the extra £4 per house council tax to meet the cost of 14 extra members of staff and their equipment.

Bury's educational achievements are remarkable and prove that in education you benefit from the positive signals you send to your children from home and society.

After 20 years of savaging collective effort in the public sector, promoting individualism in general, and slashing Bury's expenditure in particular, it is surprising to me that we have held our end up as well as we have.

Like my colleagues, I am in politics because we all get a bigger discount on social costs through the public sector.

We would have loved to do 20 and 40 years ago what Ms Ivanoff has just discovered, only narrow-minded comments about selection, about being "over-educated, jumped-up oiks", and stupid remarks about merit and class, held us back.

If we are to educate 100 per cent of our children and not just the top one-fifth - as was the case until quite recently - then it will cost us. But it will cost us a lot more if we do not pay.

FRANK ADAM,

Hartley Avenue,

Prestwich.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.