SO the answer to teacher shortage is assistants to take teachers’ classes while they prepare and mark. Yet the answer to low attainment is to train teachers in the delivery of three or four-part lessons. A contradiction surely when the Office for Standards in Education requires teachers to actively manage student learning to deliver a good lesson. How exactly are class babysitters going to contribute to improvements in attainment? No doubt we’ll have an answer when the Government’s left hand knows what the right is doing.

Roy Hobson

42 Welby Place

Sheffield