JUST six years after starting up with £2,000 in savings and cash from a car loan, the two men who founded a teacher supply agency sold the business last week for £13 million.

I do not begrudge them a penny. They identified a market and set out to serve it - with evident success.

All the same, does no-one in government pause to wonder why such a lucrative multi-million-pound market exists when it sucks up huge amounts of taxpayers' cash?

We are told the firm set up by Reza Mirsadeghi and John Heffernan provides 4,500 teachers a week to schools across the country to cover for sick and absent staff. And it is far from the only such agency living off teachers missing from the nation's classrooms.

But do not the sheer numbers and vast cost of absent teachers - be they through unfilled vacancies, sickness or involvement in courses - suggest that a great many pupils are getting makeshift tuition from casual staff called in at short notice?

What impact on education standards has the existence of this moonlighting army, particularly if many are "teaching" subjects in which they are not qualified?

Furthermore, if the numbers of supply staff are sufficient to meet those of teachers who are absent, what does their availability tell us?

That droves of teachers have been allowed to retire early - many ostensibly on sickness grounds that make classrooms unbearable stress-filled hell-holes for them - and then allowed to return when they need a bit of extra lolly to top up their premature pensions and in such considerable numbers that a lucrative new industry has sprung up on the back of the situation?

I wonder.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.