SIR - The Government's latest madcap idea is to allocate school places by lottery.

What planet are they on? Certainly not the one which needs to cut unnecessary travel to reduce congestion and address climate change.

Taken with their previous pretentious wheeze, where schools were encouraged to become "specialist centres", the effect on travel is enormous, with kids shipped across towns and cities, often to the place furthest from home.

We should adopt a policy of taking the schooling to the kids', rather than taking the kids to the schooling'.

Every child should attend the nearest state school, at which it becomes the responsibility of the education service to deliver what each child needs.

That may have been tricky a decade ago, but look at all the communications technology in our schools now - this means the student does not always need to be in the same place as the teacher, lessons could be remote and, even better, one brilliant teacher could teach hundreds, or thousands, at the same time, with local supervision at each classroom.

So come on educators, think outside the box and use some of that expensive technology to solve real problems.

Graham Hoyle, Kirkbourne Grove, Baildon