AT present four crucial things are happening simultaneously. First is the debate started by Estelle Morris about the role of assistants. Second is the impact, if any, of Price-waterhouseCoopers’ report on teacher workload. Third is the new education Bill. Perhaps most important in the short-term is the fourth: a Treasury-driven spending review, the result of which, six months down the line, will tell Ms Morris just how much she has to spend almost up to the next general election.

Although the PwC report is likely to dominate teachers’ immediate attention, Ms Morris’s pamphlet on assistants Professionalism and Trust is of far greater long-term importance. It could be as significant as James Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech that dominated the education agenda through the 1980s and 1990s. It is required reading. Ms Morris is courageously blunt. She argues compellingly that, even on the most optimistic forecasts, there is no chance that enough teachers will be recruited.

If she is right, and her logic is hard to fault, what is her answer? That only re-engineering the workforce and giving support staff a more central role will meet the challenge. She supports her argument by pointing out that technology will, in any case, radically alter how children acquire knowledge.

Many argue that the Morris blueprint is a cynical, cost-cutting exercise. Teachers, they say, will be angered by the implication that anyone, given slim-line training and a crib sheet, can do their job. Parents will complain about their children being taught by cheap, unqualified instructors.

But have the critics a better solution that fits the inconvenient facts? If they have, they’re keeping mighty quiet about it.

In any case, the Morris strategy needs to be assessed in the context of the PwC report. Its findings are obvious to the point of banality: a major reason for teachers being over-worked is that they are performing administrative tasks peripheral to their core role.

The answer to this is not to recruit an army of under-paid and poorly trained staff.

Instead we must create a new breed of “para-professionals” with proper training, status and rewards. They should have their own career structure, including the chance to become teachers if they wish. Their position would be like that of legal executives in a solicitors’ firm.

Is the money there? The clue is in one sentence where Ms Morris says: “We do not rule out further investment, and delivery of an effective workload package will be the department’s top schools priority.”

It is inconceivable that this pledge was not approved by the Treasury. Now teachers must strengthen Morris’s hand in negotiating more cash in the Cabinet, not bite it off. They should accept that, until the spending review is complete, she cannot commit any more money.

None of this is to say that between them Morris and PwC have got it totally right. It is profoundly disappointing that the PwC report makes no firm recommendation about limits to contact time or working hours. Were they incompetent? Did they chicken out? How can you discuss an “effective workload package” if talking about its size is taboo?

Also, both Morris and PwC are disturbingly starry-eyed about the impact of technology. Does Estelle wish to be the Captain Kirk of English politics with PwC as her starship navigator? Or will she and the Government face up to the fact that neither the hardware, software, staff training or support exist for such a technology utopia? Tomorrow’s solutions cannot answer today’s problems.

As for the Bill, Ms Morris needs to remind herself that excessive deregulation could be even worse than over-regulation. The best example of the problems she may face, the experience of post-incorporation further education colleges, is in her own backyard.

Peter Smith is general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers