IT IS appalling that head teachers in East Lancashire, charged with the task of improving education standards - and handsomely rewarded from the public purse for their role in this far from complete task - should rebel against the government's plans for performance-related pay and so encourage their staff to do the same.

They are failing their pupils by giving their blessing to bad teaching and mediocrity.

And they should be carpeted by education chiefs.

It is, however, no surprise to find that seven of the nine Blackburn heads, who have jointly called for a boycott of the payment-by-results system, belong to the National Union Teachers, that reactionary and recalcitrant bastion of bolshie trade unionism that is still stuck in the dream world of the left-wing levellers.

For, despite endless evidence of appalling standards in education - witness the disclosure only three weeks ago that less than two-thirds of 11-year-olds are up to the level they should be in English and maths - these dinosaurs have resisted every attempt to both determine the state of schooling and to improve it.

They have fought over the national curriculum, over testing, over the league tables, over publication of examination results and now over performance-related pay.

But why are they so afraid of appraisal and accountability?

They should come out into the real world - and see how managers and workers in business and industry are subject to constant evaluation that not only governs the pay and career progress of millions but also has the virtue of improving and securing the companies and enterprises they run and for which they work.

There is absolutely no reason why teachers should be exempt from this - especially when the current state of education shrieks about the need for just such a stimulus.

And it is staggeringly arrogant for public employees to seek to avoid accountability to their paymasters .

Dedicated and hard-working teachers - the vast majority - need have no fear of performance-related pay.

Indeed, those doing a proper job should welcome it for the gains it offers them.

Surely, they cannot be happy that blanket pay scales reward them just as well as the apathetic plodders in the staff room for whose shortcomings they have to make up.

They are the ones their blinkered and blimpish union leaders would protect as they threaten boycotts and industrial action.

Sensible and realistic teachers should stand firm against them - and so must the government.

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