Two articles from 9 August (Steve Eddison’s column, “Stopping the tide”, and What keeps me awake at night, “Unrealistic workload and unmanageable pressure”) detail the pressures that the modern teacher is subject to, including “managers greedy for evidence”. This reminds me of a colleague, an arch-Thatcherite, who used to say, “If you can’t measure it, don’t do it.”

I find it very sad that many of the things that attract people into the teaching profession are the very aspects that cannot be measured, and that many of the things that remain, which can be deemed to be the measurable minutiae, are the things by which one is meant to prove one’s worth.

Tony Mills, Semi-retired languages tutor, Stockton-on-Tees.