Education: Your views: Performance-related pay: what a load of cobblers

The article by Dr Andrew Cunningham ("Personally Speaking", Education, 15 April), is replete with simplistic analogies and simple solutions to the vexed issue of performance-related pay.

He comes across as a magician who can pull simple solutions to tricky questions out of a hat. "Leave it to the kids to decide who the bad teachers are." It's the "keen teachers... (who) deserve more dosh than the dossers." Dr Cunningham makes a further simple point: "We systematically entrust our most precious asset, our children, to teachers who don't do their job properly because they've got no financial incentive whatsoever to improve." It's a "carrot" which will make our teachers work harder and do their job properly. Dr Cunningham even calls for the stick in some cases.

From his comfortable perch in the independent sector, where class sizes are not an issue, where children are regarded as assets, rather than unpredictable human beings, everything must indeed appear simple.