Michael Gove believes “there has never been a better time to be a teacher”. He asserts that “amazing things have been - and are being - achieved by the academies movement” and that the new national curriculum is “explicitly sharper”.

However, teachers faced with stagnant pay, the abolition of incremental progression, attacks on their conditions of service and the threat of longer teaching days and terms, not to mention forced increased pension contributions, would be reluctant to agree.

As for the rushing through of a curriculum that has been condemned by experts and does not, incidentally, have to be adopted by the “amazing” academies, well, I for one cannot imagine why anyone would even contemplate training as a teacher at this depressingly punitive time.

Fred Greaves, Division secretary, Surrey National Union of Teachers.