THE NEW school term has begun with a staffing crisis as we are told that 10,000 empty teaching posts mean many children are being taught by temporary supply teachers or ones without proper training in the subjects they are teaching.

But much as this may be a result of teaching being, as members of the profession claim, an under-rewarded occupation, is it not more a symptom of something else - of droves of teachers being allowed to retire early on "health grounds" and with fat publicly-funded pensions when firms in the private sector would have come to a halt if they allowed an exodus on such a scale?

Any teacher who bats on to the official retirement age these days really does deserve a gold clock - for being such a rare bird.

What happened to dedication?

Also to blame, of course, are the education authorities - the same local government spenders of other people's money responsible for the costly early-retirement scandal in our town halls.

They have not only rubber-stamped the damaging deluge of teachers' early-retirement applications, but also allowed the same "too sick and stressed to carry on" bunch to come back and stick their noses in the public-expenditure trough yet again by exploiting the teacher shortage they have created and returning on "supply" to teach - frequently subjects they know little about - at hugely generous rates of pay.

At the very least, these mercenary teacher-pensioners should be banned from our schools and the money saved given as performance-related rises to the ones who are prepared to stick full-time to the job.

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