Juliette Marres (Letters, August 25) may have been an efficient secretary but she is not too hot at logic.

She calls me a nitwit but obviously hasn't bothered to examine my argument.

Her comments are a complete non sequitur.

I neither stated nor even suggested that professionals should not be qualified.

On the contrary, my point was that there are far more pupils and students capable of acquiring professional status than elitists (such as Juliette?) would have us believe.

I gave your reporter chapter and verse to back my contention, which presumably he hadn't the space to include.

Long before the introduction of comprehensive schools, 11+ rejects were passing the Grammar School Exam in increasing numbers. That was not the A Level but it was a difficult exam of the kind to which our present-day elitists nostalgically refer.

This was proof positive that there is a far greater reservoir of academic ability in the population than they would like to allow.

Not that exams and academic ability are the only measures of worthwhile achievement.

In any case, exam results are, at best, only a rough guide to a person's potential.

I don't know what Juliette's qualifications are for making her sweeping judgments.

Mine are half a lifetime teaching in secondary modern and comprehensive schools as well lecturing in a German university.

Incidentally, I also deplore the English attitude to foreign languages but that, as she seems to realise, is no new phenomenon.

-Leonard Goldman, Brighton