Part of the necessary background to any informed debate is the fact that the Entitlement Framework requires post primary schools to deliver access to a required number of courses at key stage 4 (14-16 years) and similarly a required number of courses post 16. Given its size, it is not clear how Lurgan College could deliver the required number of courses.

Your correspondent Bilal Zahid who rightly takes pride in the achievements and "diverse array of subjects" delivered by the College in the past is evidently unaware of this. Your correspondent "Dickson Plan Supporter" is probably aware of it, but covers up the difficulties, forethought and planning necessary to meet these requirements successfully across the controlled sector with the bland and unsupported assertion that the schools in the Dickson Plan are "well on the way towards…meeting the demands…including the Entitlement Framework." While individual schools and teachers will always do their best to cope with whatever the SELB and Department of Education throw at them, it is a categorical fact that there is presently no strategic plan for the Lurgan area. Until there is, piecemeal development of part of the controlled sector with no consideration for how all the schools in that sector will interrelate and work together simply does not make any sort of sense.

Of course those who have vested interests in the development of the College are always liable to succumb to the temptation to forward that vested interest without thought for the bigger framework within which the whole controlled sector should be developed, and a number of your correspondents fall into that category. I sympathise with them because I am proud to be an old boy of Watts Endowed School, and I want to see it prosper, but not without proper thought having been given to how the entire controlled sector should be developed and interrelate. If you do not do this, you are potentially doing a massive disservice to all of the pupils in that sector.