SIR With the outrageous accusation of small schools receiving overly generous financial settlements, at the expense of those schools with deprivation needs, we can safely say that with friends like Mr Foster, Worcestershire doesn't need any enemies.

Strange though, isn't it? When city schools are entitled to claim the additional five city grants and so forth that non city schools are entirely exempt from applying for, how they can possibly be worse off than all the other county schools? Perhaps Mr Foster would enlighten us.

If Worcester city schools are short of cash, it is for exactly the same reason as to why any school in Worcestershire is cash- strapped. And that is because Mr Foster's very own government has even further relegated us against our Birmingham neighbours, the national average and our old adversaries Herefordshire by between a further whopping 83 and 121 per cent on the originally existing real terms funding gap.

This is since 1998-99 alone - and yet we have still had to absorb the same rising national wage costs and resources costs as anywhere else.

Instead of trying to penalise other areas of Worcestershire to better your own constituency, Mr Foster (robbing Peter to pay Paul, I think you used to call it), it's about time that you started shouting for a fairer share of the national funding pot. And this time, Mr Foster, you cannot claim my figures are "utterly meaningless" as you have previously alleged in the Worcester News, as I now have it in writing, from the DfES, that the comparisons I have drawn from the information are correct.

HELEN DONOVAN,

Evesham.