SIR — There's no reason why West Somerset College should not be one of the best schools in the country, but the disappointing 2014 GCSE results are a major concern not just to the students and their parents but to all of us in the wider community. So it was gratifying to see the open letter from the chair and vice-chair of the governors of the college, summarised in the Free Press and available to read in full on the college website. Openly recognising the seriousness of the situation in which the college finds itself is a first step towards some improvement. As Jim Butterworth pointed out in his letter to you last week, the governors are ultimately responsible for standards at the college - they are there to "support and challenge" and we haven't been aware of too much of the latter recently. The governors need to continue this openness and reassure the whole community that effective action is being taken. Lack of this assurance is surely behind the online petition that hundreds have signed, though the petition doesn't get action in the right order in demanding that the governors first remove the principal and then call in Ofsted. The college urgently needs an independent and professional audit of teaching and learning in the GCSE years, and, for want of anyone better, Ofsted can do this. It may well be that changes in senior leadership will be necessary, but let's first have an objective view of what is needed. It is sad, though, to see in their letter that the chairman and vice-chairman of governors lay part of the blame for this sorry state of affairs on the "unwelcome distraction" of the principal "seeing off external attempts to destabilise relationships in the West Somerset family of schools". It was the college governors who, in 2013, tried to extend the college age range to include Years 7 and 8, and to do it in such a secretive and cackhanded way that other local schools felt their very existence threatened - it was these who did the 'seeing off', not the principal. This whole episode badly eroded trust between schools and dented confidence in West Somerset College's leadership and governance. We are asked in the letter to see the new educational structure at the college as some sort of guarantee that standards will be driven up. Yet many may be confused by teaching and learning at GCSE level organised not around subjects but around five 'faculties' with names like Imagine, Explore, Experience and the like, with some apparently bizarre groupings of subjects - English shares the 'Imagine' faculty with art, hospitality, construction and public services. As any headteacher will tell you, driving up standards at GCSE demands a hard-headed and ruthless focus on individual students and their work, and straightforward subject departments are a tried and proven way of doing this. Yet perhaps this new West Somerset structure will prove the key to unlock the potential not currently being realised - one hopes the governors have some tight monitoring in place. The message to the college governors must be this - arrest this downward spiral now, raise your profile and convince the rest of us that you can ensure the college has leadership effective enough to motivate and support the many excellent college staff to get the very best results in 2015 and beyond. For the sake of our young people that is what the whole of West Somerset expects and demands. Geoff Lloyd, Quay Street, Minehead.