EmailMichael Gove (Report, 25 July) believes that people who oppose performance-related pay for teachers are "defensive, leftwing, ideologically committed" and to be ignored. Perhaps they just know more about how schools work than he does. Suppose, on market principles, a school decides to pay an excellent history teacher more than a not quite so good teacher of physics? Suppose the disgruntled physicist then decides to move school. He is the only well-qualified teacher of that subject the school has and well-paid jobs for his kind are widely advertised. Raise his salary to prevent him moving? Let him leave and see physics results tumble? Is the answer, on market principles, to pay both teachers more: one for merit and the other for being scarce? The sensible approach to this problem has always been and remains to leave it to individual schools to decide where to place teachers, for whatever reason, on some nationally agreed pay scale. Tinkering with that helps no one.
Peter Newsam
Thornton Dale, North Yorkshire
• If there is clear, research-basedevidence that performance-related pay for teachers is an effective tool for raising standards, why doesn't Michael Gove simply publish it, instead of referring to the results of meaningless opinion polls and mounting cheap ad hominem attacks against those who disagree with him? Could it possibly be that such evidence does not exist and that Gove is (or imagines himself to be) in receipt of a form of divine illumination denied to his inferiors?
Michael Pyke
Campaign for State Education
• Iain Paterson (Letters, 25 July) called to mind my experience, when I was in charge of a small education unit in the 1960s, of the advice, encouragement and help I received from members of Her Majesty's Inspectorate. I still recall their friendly approach, compared with Ofsted. Which approach, I wonder, best serves the needs of education?
Lionel Burman
West Kirby, Wirral
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