Some classroom assistants are superhuman. By all means allow them to supervise some lessons.

Some pupils are model pupils. By all means allow them to be supervised by assistants in some lessons.

But please stop there. Otherwise your proposal to the Social Market Foundation in London last Monday that classroom assistants could supervise some lessons for absent teachers (TES, November 16) proves that you have given up on recruiting and retaining teachers.

Classroom assistants do a terrific job. Without them, more teachers would have given up by now - but assisting and teaching are poles apart. Suggesting that the two are interchangeable makes a mockery of your assertion that “even well-intentioned opposition in the past has served to undermine the status of the profession”. Teachers train for four years and you tell us that the job can be done by assistants with no qualification? Who’s undermining it now?

Mike Tomlinson, chief inspector of schools, has noted a strong link between declining standards of pupil behaviour and the increase in lessons covered by supply teachers. At my last school, a challenging inner-city comprehensive, I dreaded going on courses. On my return, I would find in my pigeonhole a long list of miscreants whom I then had to discipline. Is it any wonder that no supply teachers will come within a mile of it?

How long until classroom assistants begin fleeing their own schools because they find they are not cut out for the constant battle of the classroom? And before the many good things about teaching pale into insignificance against the stress of dealing with the fallout of lessons taken by overwhelmed assistants, driving more teachers than ever to decide the job isn’t worth the effort? Yet you calmly tell us that teachers should become more like consultants than junior doctors, overseeing the work of a “range” of adults.

Forgive me, but are patients’ relationships with consultants and junior doctors so wonderful that they should serve as a model to other public services? Or are so many patients so upset at feeling so external to proceedings precisely because the system designed to care for them is so stretched that at times it could hardly care less?

Perhaps we could opt for the French school system, where a teacher only has to be on site for a fixed number of hours while, in secondary schools, pupils not in lessons are supervised by surveillants, typically university students financing their studies. France, where the word “school” is so often preceded by the words “violence at” that the government has launched television and radio advertisements as part of its efforts against school violence (TES, October 19).

I would not dream of advocating an education system which showed such disregard for one of the great strengths of British schools: pupil-teacher relationships. But what do I know? I am clearly, in your words, one of “those who recoil cynically from reform whenever it is mooted”. And there I was thinking reform was supposed to make things better.

Jenny Owl is a pseudonym. She is a head of department in the north of England