TDCs, as they are now officially known at the Department for Education and Employment, include teachers in pupil-referral units, behaviour and ethnic minority support teachers, advisory teachers, hospital teachers and teachers of the hearing impaired.

They are incredibly badly supported regarding threshold assessment; they have no national data to use, local data is patchy or non-existent and the guidance pays little more than lip service to them.

At a training session I ran recently in an inner ondon borough, a large proportion of the 40 colleagues I worked with had not received any threshold information, let alone guidance or forms and had received no support or training from their line managers.

Generally speaking these are good people, doing very difficult jobs in largely unrecognised circumstances and I believe they have a very good case for an extension to the June 5 deadline if they are to have the same opportunities as mainstream colleagues.

We all know the timetable has been ridiculously tight but these people really are a special case.

CR Bush

Principal

Linton Village College

Linton, Cambridge