I AM not aware of whether any South Wiltshire school heads joined the protest in Parliament Square last Friday; but if so, and if there are readers who know them or know of them, there is an important point to be made.

Heads from all parts of the country represented schools linked to local councils, and there is good reason for this, at the root of their protest lies not only underfunding, but imbalance of funding.

Ministers may cavil as much as they like about sums which have now been allocated to education, but disproportionate amounts have been channelled into the establishment of academies and free schools, some of which are surely little more than vanity projects. Academy chains, moreover, resemble nothing so much as business consortia, with handsomely paid executives as a matter of course.

If academies and free schools are getting more, someone else is getting less, and this is why so comparatively little has been reaching the rank and file classroom.

Richard Merwood

Salisbury

n Editor's note: David Pover, head teacher at the Burgate School and Sixth Form attended the rally in London (news page 3)