DEAR EDITOR: Earlier this year the Catholic News was good enough to publish a series of three articles written by me entitled “Can the Catholic Church lead the way for reform of the Education system?”

As a follow up to those articles I would like to raise the following issues.

Has the Catholic Education Board analysed the Common Entrance/Secondary Education Assessment (SEA) results for Catholic primary schools for the last five years? Do those results indicate that some Catholic schools do consistently well (e.g. St Gabriel's) and others do consistently poorly? If so has the Board attempted to determine why some schools do well and others do poorly so as to put measures in place to correct such a situation?

If this has not been done will the Catholic School Board now commission such a study and, in the spirit of transparency, publish the results?

I will make what no doubt will be considered by some to be a controversial statement. If some Catholic Primary Schools do not perform as well as St Gabriel's then the Catholic Education system, and by extension the Catholic Church, is failing the children of those schools that do poorly, many of whom are members of the flock of the Catholic Church.

Congratulations to St Gabriel's and to the children from that school. Keep up the good work, but please help the other Catholic primary schools that are not doing so well.

John Spence, Trincity