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I've been puzzled by the responses to your Laura Spence interview. Some have bordered on the abusive. Your most recent correspondent (Letters, August 20) wrote of the "total commitment of his Oxford colleagues to seek out the greatest talent regardless of school backgrounds" and then suggested Spence was "not even a near miss at Oxford". The same issue carried a report on Sutton Trust research that suggests that "some 3,000 state-school pupils are missing out on their rightful places at elite universities". Perhaps a little more total commitment and a little less disdainfulness might be appropriate?

Ormond Simpson
Open University