THERE have been a couple of letters in your paper in recent weeks about teachers and the affect the recent snow blizzard had on them.

One correspondent referred to a fairly light snowfall which became an icy risk on unsalted roads, but complained at the wholesale closure of schools due to the absenteeism of teachers.

The writer made the valid point that other vital workers got to their places of employment by making allowances for the weather and leaving earlier, but teachers declined to do so.

There was a response from a teacher who, while playing the old record of the long hours, the hard work etc, briefly made an unconvincing defence of her stay-at-home colleagues.

Can I say my two pennorth worth?

Teachers are now stealing themselves for work after their Christmas sojourn.

The first half-term of the year is the holiday they feel most in need of.

It is, after all, a full five weeks since the end of their extended Christmas break, and that’s a long time to be continuously making extremely large sums of money.

To avoid a charge of bias, I’d like to refer to a story that was in the Daily Mail on December 30, which used government figures to declare that, in Britain, 15,000 teachers take a sicky each day. The article went on to say that 311,100 teachers took at least one day off sick in 2007/2008.

Of course, this may have been due to the fact that the majority of teachers are female and, out of necessity, had to stay at home to look after a sick child. It could also have been because there charges were so unruly that they were simply not up to meeting the challenge.

Whatever, it is time for a purge of disinterested, disheartened, incompetent teachers, our supposed pastoral guides for our young folk.

Name and address supplied