I heartily agree, Al. Like Senoufou, I'm probably a bit out of date but I still know lots of teachers, and Mrs Steve retired only five years ago. Teaching needs to attract the best people and pay good salaries. The training should be rigorous and all teachers must emphatically be made to embrace Al's point no 3. The concept of "subject teacher" is fundamentally flawed. We are living in a world in which the danger for many children is that they will be mis-educated by the cyberworld, and teachers are ill-equipped to counter it. A good teacher will play a part in every child's emotional and moral development, and that should include every teacher in every school. The days of "sex lessons" by the school nurse should be well and truly numbered.

Good teachers don't need inspecting every few years by a bunch of ill-trained failed teachers. Good teachers don't need to be told how to mark books in what colour ink. Good teachers shouldn't be submitting reams of step-by-step lesson plans to senior staff who haven't a clue about their subject areas. Good teachers shouldn't be coaching their classes to pass tests that have nothing to do with wellbeing and everything to do with league tables (which should be banned). To be a good teacher you need plenty of time to prepare lessons, say 20% of the school day. There's something severely wrong when teachers can't have a lunch break, spend ten or eleven hours a day in school and still have to take work home and turn in at weekends and for weeks of the school holidays. If you think you'll get good teachers that way you're in cloud cuckoo land. Which every government since 1986 has inhabited, ever since that clown Baker, driven by that ideologue Thatcher who wanted revenge on teachers for daring to strike, imposed a bunch of repressive regulation on teachers.

End of rant!