Letter: Children who will not learn

Sir: Home-school agreements ("Teachers to continue their strike over boy", 31 October) mean that a child's future is linked to the parents' behaviour. So the way out of a bad home through education will be denied to the very children who need it most.

I feel despair to hear these calls for discipline and the right of parents and teachers to beat children, set against the horror of Rikki Neave's death. Had that child lived he would, no doubt, have caused mayhem in the classroom. Under the new proposals, he would have been excluded from school, and, if the Right has its way, beaten by his teachers.

Psychological support costs money. Providing jobs for a nation of forgotten, angry teenagers costs money. What on earth are we to do in an election year when sticking-plaster philosophy is all that politicians want to apply?

ANN MILNES ROBERTS

Jedburgh, Borders