I read with mixed feelings that most of the children in Dorset will be attending primary schools of their parents’ choice (Echo article, April 17). Nowadays, competitiveness and education mania begins at such an early age.

When I was young (Oh, those dear dead days of long ago!) we simply attended the nearest school within walking distance, where, our parents assumed, we would receive a reasonable education while Mum got on with the business of eking out the food rations, Dad went to work and both spent time considering what to do about the great hole in the garden left where the air raid shelter once stood..

It also was taken for granted that children’s academic abilities varied greatly, and therefore we would not all become little Einsteins or Jane Austens. Good teachers were aware of this, and planned their lessons accordingly, something that now is very difficult to do due to the shambolic system created by successive governments.

Sats had not been invented, league tables was a term reserved for football clubs and a student was someone at university or college. Those still at school were children, pupils or dratted kids.

During the last year in my humble primary school in Croydon, I shared a classroom with fifty one fellow pupils and just one dedicated teacher. Paper was a precious commodity in the 1940s and every inch of our exercise book had to be filled before we were allowed a new one, and often three or four of us would share a text book.

In spite of the difficulties, that year more than twenty of us ‘passed’ the rigorous eleven plus exam to take our place in local grammar schools, where, for the first time, we had uniforms, homework and a different teacher for each subject. It also was the first time we were granted the luxury of indoor school lavatories and hand washing facilities.

The greatest bugbear of pupils and teachers alike was an army of men known as school inspectors. When I was at a teachers’ training college, we joked that some of our lecturers obviously were failed teachers and every inspector was an embittered soul who had failed to get a headship in a grammar school and took his revenge hapless teachers.upon I am sure that those who work for Ofsted are their descendants.

Susan Gow

Ringstead Crescent

Overcombe

Weymouth