Education Letter: What a performance

THANK YOU for your excellent and perceptive articles ("Exactly who is failing whom?" and "Can we break the language barrier?", EDUCATION, 5 November).

As regards Performance Related Pay, the lively suspicion is that the real aim is to cut the overall pay bill. The lucky winners in the pay lottery will be used as an example of "achievements" and "rewards", from which the vast majority will be quite deliberately excluded - although it will be made to look the reverse.

As for the General Teaching Council, the Government's proposals make it quite clear that, although teachers will be compelled to pay its running costs, it is intended to be a government poodle for the discipline and control of teachers. New Labour, Old Tory.

Philip D. Delnon

Swanscombe