NORMALLY (predictably), I take exception to John Blunt's ramblings but now it is your turn! In your editorial (LET, June 3) you focus on teachers and performance-related pay.

As a retired teacher, I object to the facile comparison with other workers.

Would car workers, at Drover Motors, struggling to make their products on redundant Lada presses, using recycled Sixties' Italian steel, think that their efforts were less worthy of reward than fellow workers down the road at Drools Boyce making superior products with the latest technology, materials and tools? Of course they wouldn't, but, like teachers, they would expect a level playing field.

Let us take two fictional schools - All Hallows Collegiate Grammar School, Bath, and All Gallows High School, Strangeways, Manchester. Obviously, the pupils and their parents of these two schools have different ambitions and expectations for their education, but do their respective teachers deserve to be paid by their results? Is one teacher more worthy than the other and who is to measure the pupils' progress or achievement? The older among your readers may well remember the educational soliloquies of the late and great Joyce Grenfell - "Don't do that, George" or the icon of a TV film dealing with the antics of a group of remedial children on a day trip to Chester Zoo. Well, many teachers, past and present, can relate all too well to such events.

We taught those kids. They didn't often pass exams and fewer still went on to higher education. Did we fail them? Did they fail us? I think not.

From time to time, we meet them - often now with families of their own. Once over the embarrassment of whether to address you as "Sir" or "Miss", they soon begin to recall their most vivid memories of their long-past schooldays. It seems to me that nowadays a school's success or otherwise is to be measured on a simple league table like the progress of a football or cricket team.

It appears to be politically incorrect to describe a school simply as a caring and happy school - more's the pity!

BOB MATTHEWS, Park Road, Cliviger, Burnley.

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