HAVING heard former Education Secretary David Blunkett on TV and radio and the many Tony Blair 'yes men' repeating again and again the spin solution to our education problem is to spend millions in the next few years, to recruit, train and then well pay teachers to keep them teaching, I must be getting too old to swallow this logic.

I reared two daughters who left the Bingley Training College in 1973. The youngest, now nearly 50, left her local ESN school scared of physical injury, the pupils fighting and she unable to teach them or risk losing her job.

The elder one, down in Suffolk, reached deputy head but resigned at Easter this year completely fed up with paperwork and having no time to teach. Now she is back in private school and enjoying teaching again.

I know I am well past my sell-by date, well over three score years and ten, but in my working days I remember attending a class, drawn from all levels of the firm, in which we were asked to put down in order of priority what we considered the most important things we wanted from our jobs.

No, it was not pay. There were around 30 in the class and top priority was job satisfaction, next came wages. Maybe our teachers, nurses, police and doctors are short of satisfaction.

J WARD, Lyndon House, Lyndon Avenue, Great Harwood.