THANK goodness for your report (September 19) about school funding.

You say that schools in the town get £2,436 per pupil. I hope our MPs read that and believe you. I have been trying to convince Michael Wills of this all summer but he prefers to believe his own Government's propaganda.

In July, at the time of the Government's Compre-hensive Spending Review, he said that per pupil funding would rise from £2,700 in 1997 to £4,900 in 2005, and that this was "good news for Swindon".

I challenged his initial figure, and think the 2005 figure is pretty suspect as well.

There are, of course, differences between schools because of pupil ages, and the Government money is divided between straight per pupil allocations and the other money that heads receive in direct grants or manage to claim under the Standards Fund. Taking the most generous possible figures, but excluding capital funding for named building projects, the secondary school where I am a governor still has not reached £2,700 per pupil. The DFES figures are bogus.

As for the proposed reforms of local authority funding, they are bogus as well.

How can any reform which results in one of the F40 councils getting even less be a reform? All this talk about how we are relatively wealthy is being privately repeated by MPs ie, they have already thrown in the towel on a vital issue affecting us all.

The Swindon LEA failed on Ofsted and has been replaced. What should be done about a central Government which uses bogus figures and lets us all down?

Andrew Martin

Yiewsley Crescent

Stratton St Margaret

Swindon