Sir.–With regard to the article “Parents suffer school catchment setback” that appeared on the front page of a recent Monday Gazette.

Is it really a “setback” to have Cranbourne as your catchment school? Equally, are Oakley parents really justified when they say (as one unnamed parent did) that they “don’t think Cranbourne is good enough”?

My daughter left Cranbourne in 2006 with 12 GCSEs, six of which were at grade A and six at A*. She went on to study for her |A-levels at Queen Mary’s College, in Basingstoke, and was subsequently offered a place at Cambridge University.

An education at Cranbourne certainly seemed to be “good enough” to impress both her examiners and also the admissions tutors at Cambridge. My son is in Year 9 at the school, is happy, and is also doing very well academically.

As a parent governor at Cranbourne, I get to see a lot of paperwork that is generated in relation to the school. In the last year, I have seen an Ofsted report that described Cranbourne as “a rapidly improving school which provides a satisfactory education for its students”.

I have also seen a report published by the RAISEonline organisation in which Cranbourne was scored as adding significantly positive value to its pupils’ education between Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4.

It would be fair to say that for a few years Cranbourne stood still when it should have been tightening up its internal quality assurance procedures.

However, following the appointment of Mrs Elkins as head teacher in 2006, it has made enormous improvements in this area, leading to 64 per cent of youngsters in Year 11 achieving five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C in 2008, which was the best result in the school’s history.

Cranbourne is a school that is very much ‘on the up’, and it seems to me that the Oakley parents are operating with information that is out of date.

I would encourage them to visit the school and talk to the youngsters and teachers there to find out what it is really like. If they do, I suspect they will realise how fortunate they are that the catchment boundaries are drawn where they are.

–Nigel Wooldridge, E-mail