THE announcement about Fulford Cross School gives out a confusing and negative message.

Recent articles in your paper covering the proposal to relocate the referral unit from Oaklands School and to combine that with vocational courses suggests that pupils who choose a vocational, rather than an academic route, are either troublemakers or failures.

Vocational education provides us with plumbers, bricklayers, electricians, joiners, decorators and plasterers, indeed all the skilled craftsmen who build and maintain our buildings.

Any proposal that links, intentionally or otherwise, these valuable members of society with the troublemakers who disrupt education for the majority of children in our schools, gives the wrong message.

David Johnson,

Main Street,

Upper Poppleton,

York.

Updated: 11:58 Monday, October 27, 2003