SIR — Having received a letter from the governors of West Somerset College which was clearly prompted by the petition raised with the aim of removing the principal and calling in Ofsted, I confess to being even more concerned than I was after the bare facts of the exam results were made public. The governors state that "our main focus over the last two years has been on raising standards so as to increase the opportunities available to our children to progress to university or directly into jobs that offer good long-term prospects". So they've not done too well in achieving their focus. In fact they have failed miserably. By their own admission, the governors further state that there is an "apparent inability to improve student attainment at GCSE level". Really? Well you don't need a degree to work that out, which is just as well because judging by current educational standards at the college, very few of our children are likely to get decent GCSEs, let alone degrees! It appears the governors expect our genuine concerns to be placated because they "have asked for an urgent investigation into this". Hardly very satisfactory for parents whose children have, possibly, repeatedly failed their GCSE English exam. Worryingly, we are also told that "even if students' English results had been in line with the targets that the governors had set, the percentage of students achieving five good GCSEs including English and Maths would still have been no higher than 2012". So the exam targets set by the governors were not intended to initiate increasing standards but only to keep pace, and the college couldn't even manage to achieve that! We learn too that the college had "the additional challenge of seeing off external attempts to destabilise relationships within the West Somerset family of schools." But I thought the destabilisation issue arose because the college wanted to lower the age at which children could enter the college, so in fact the college created the "destabilised relationship" themselves. Clearly the college has proved it cannot even deliver the goods for the students it has, so how on earth did it seriously expect to increase the student numbers and ensure they would achieve a reasonable educational standard? The governors' letter also states that "we asked the principal to make the improvement of teaching and learning her main focus". Well, she has clearly failed as results show. Although the college students may win an award for the sartorial elegance lent to them by the nice new purple uniforms. I note too, that the governors "were particularly concerned at the gap that we had observed between the college's view of the progress that students were making and the results that those students achieved in examinations". Well if the college had listened to the concerns being expressed by parents, they could have reached the same conclusion a lot earlier. It also appears that the governors "have been pleased to see the levels of accuracy of prediction improving in most subject areas . . ." So the best that the governors can pull out of the current disgraceful situation is that apparently predictions that student levels of achievement are going to be incredibly poor are now much more accurate. And what exactly are the Governors going to do with that information? As of September 1, we have a new faculty structure at the college which "will strengthen the accountability of the subject teacher for the progress made by an individual student, and will enable additional support to be given where it is most needed" . But why has that accountability not been in place anyway? Having said that, most of the teachers with whom I have spoken have appeared to be genuinely trying to do their best, and the feeling I got was that the problem was less with the teaching staff and more with the leadership, but what do I know? We are, I suppose, expected to be reassured that the governors "have every confidence in the ability of our leadership team to deliver (with your help) better outcomes for our young people". So the governors are expecting parents, like them, to "have every confidence" in the same leadership team which has basically overseen exam standards progressively falling to the current disgraceful level. I agree 100 per cent with the sentiments of "Head out, Ofsted in". But we shouldn't be too quick to target only the head. The governors have also appeared to lose the plot. After all, surely they should have been far more pro-active in determining what exactly was happening at the college. Surely it should be the governors' role to push themselves into any areas that give rise to concern. After all, they are, in my opinion, not answerable to the college but to the parents. Whether we like it or not, unless one has the money or is able to make the necessary sacrifices, in the Minehead area we have a choice of only one college, but this is no reason for the apparent complacency on the part of the college leadership team and the governors to be complacent. Our children deserve better . . . a lot better! Paul Davies, Queens Road, Minehead.