Letter: Wail in the dark from a human resource

AS A further education lecturer and thus a member of another group of people who are being 'managed', I didn't know whether to be amused or depressed by your article 'The New English Babble' (12 June).

The catalogue of 'management speak' was all too familiar; we are bombarded daily with forests of directives, advice, aides-memoire, notifications and memoranda on how to keep our customers happy, increase our effectiveness, improve the quality of our product and at the same time rationalise our time management.

Like the staff at the BBC, we too now work for a corporation, and are under great pressure, as they are, to accept a new contract which offers far worse conditions of service. Our many managers assure us that if there is no increase in productivity, then the college budget will suffer 'holdback'. This will probably result in downsizing, though doubtless not among the management spine, whose performance-

related pay far outstrips the frozen salaries of lecturers.

Where, you may ask, does education feature in all this? This is a question which I cannot answer.

Name withheld

Torquay