RECENT research by a Newcastle University academic claims the working class aren't as intelligent as those from wealthier backgrounds (Echo, May 22).

Does this research take into account the fact that from the start of a working class child's education they are placed in oversized classes and are taught by overworked teachers who are often aided or replaced by unqualified teaching assistants?

Instead of an education for life, they are taught how to pass exams so the school can look good in a league table, thus avoiding facing closure and to keep an overpaid bureaucrat in a job.

Their education will be limited by funding, unlike the more prestigious schools which select pupils not upon a child's academic abilities, but upon the affluence of its parents.

Everything that is wrong with our society, country and planet was forewarned time and again by people of all social classes, but denigrated by those wealthy and privately-educated individuals who run everything.

The pure stupidity of these socalled intellectual superiors has ruined this and many other countries.

CT Riley, Spennymoor, Co Durham.