RE the letter in the Review of August 29 from Shirley and Carol re the Five Acre campus.

At one time the Five Acre campus consisted of a grammar school and Berry Hill Secondary School.

In the '70s the grammar school was converted to a sixth form college and the secondary education was all delivered at Lakers Comprehensive School on the site of the previous Berry Hill School.

There has been further education in the Forest for a long time, preceding the introduction of the comprehensive and the college, but recently that has been undermined by Gloucester College directing Forest students up to Gloucester for courses which I am told had been available at Five Acres.

I taught at the Royal Forest of Dean Grammar School and since it became a sixth form college much money has been spent modifying and upgrading it for college education. The issue of money is the £15 million to build a new college when already much money has been spent creating a perfectly adequate education facility at Five Acres.

Prior to teaching at the grammar school I studied at a Russell Group university and the lecture rooms I attended there, despite it being a Russell Group one, were much as the classrooms I taught in the grammar school, save the lectures that were for at least 100-plus people. 

In both types of establishment there was a desk/table and a teacher/lecturer.  The essence in both was human input/output. That was the value.

Value is the essence of this coalfield regeneration and it is to be value for the whole Forest of Dean, all the Forest of Dean coalfield.  

Let us not waste the assets. Let us maximise the assets we have, both the buildings and the natural world, and a certain very large amount of taxpayers' money.

We already have the college building. Tourism is a certain industry that we have and the Cinderford Northern Quarter is a jewel of a tourist asset.  

Remember, we know not the cost of coping with the underground legacy of mining – is that a bottomless pit for taxpayer's money to drop into?

– Former teacher, Cinderford.