Letter: Complex route to graduate tax

Sir: Labour's proposed student loan system could and should be improved. When I was a student at Berkeley and Harvard in the late 1960s and early 1970s I, like many of my friends, took out at least one student loan, to be repaid once we had graduated, entered employment and were earning well above the level of the minimum wage.

At that time the best-known feature of the Federal student loan programme was that if you became a teacher you only had to pay back half the loan. For a political party that claims to give a high priority to education, adopting a similar approach would be little more than common sense.

GEOFFREY PERRET

Beverley, East Yorkshire