AS a recently retired secondary school teacher I found no great surprise in reading the contents of your front page article (“New teacher dropouts are fuelled by cuts and stress", The Herald, May 9. I am also underwhelmed by the news that school literacy rates have again taken a dip.

The root problem is obvious, as Bill Clinton might have said: “It's the curriculum, stupid”. All secondary teachers (I have no experience of primary teaching) are struggling under the weight of the badly thought out, disastrously introduced, woolly, vague and amorphous "Curriculum for Excellence" (CfE).

Teachers with decades of experience are drowning under a tsunami of bureaucratic educational double speak, much of which was badly written, often contradictory and almost impossible to clearly understand. When we add to this the equally hilarious attempt at trying to assess this heap of jumbled-up nonsense, the new National and Higher exams, then we can go a long way to explaining why many young teachers leave, don't survive long or stick it out but are unhappy in their jobs. It also helps to explain why hundreds of experienced and inspirational teachers are queuing up to find a way out of the profession.

CfE is so lacking in direction and rigour and the assessment procedures are so unintelligible that it is no wonder that many teachers are at the end of their tether. I believe that changing the curriculum must only be done to improve the educational experiences of our young people and therefore provide an enhancement of their life opportunities. The change must be better than what we had. When one considers the problems outlined in your article alongside falling literacy (and numeracy) levels, CfE is obviously not the answer.

Yes, the “old” curriculum had its problems, however, the "solution" has proved to be immeasurably more unwieldy and is substantially lacking in direction. Put simply, CfE is not an improvement on what we had, on the contrary, it is nothing short of a shambles. The old argument that CfE needs time to “bed in” no longer holds water, the fact we need to face is that it is simply not fit for purpose.

The embryonic CfE was conceived during the days of the Labour/LibDem coalition at Holyrood. Even then, many teachers were voicing their concerns. When the SNP came to power in 2007, as a minority administration, it had the chance to nip the whole crazy idea in the bud, I bet now it sincerely wishes it had.

As the years have passed, tens of millions of pounds have been thrown at this ill-conceived and, as we have since discovered, failed initiative. Whilst the present Scottish Government’s attempts at reducing the assessment burden of the new National and Higher exams and the extra funding it is providing is to be commended, it has to realise that these measures are simply mitigating, not solving the root problem. The best way to improve Scottish education is to get rid of the reason for its current failures, and that reason is CfE.

Alan Carroll,

24 The Quadrant, Glasgow.

MANY observers have been aware for years that preparing new teachers for Scottish schools has been a dam just waiting to burst. Although the teaching profession has long been associated with an almost pathological aura of discontent, I fear that we are now witnessing the result of many more fundamental factors involving poor decision-making in the past affecting the longer term stability of the profession.

The determination some years ago to abolish Scottish colleges of education with their experience in training school staff, built up over many decades, delivered a tacit message. I feel it was perceived by many that teaching was not to be regarded as having the same high status as other professions. Most other professions such as medicine and the law have a high level of independence in terms of their schools sensibly controlling renewal in their ranks.

I am not suggesting that the previous college training system always provided teachers who were “oven ready” for the challenges of interacting with young people, but the current system now appears by comparison woefully inadequate. The incidences of disaffection among new teachers displayed in your article surely demonstrates an urgent need to hold an inquiry. I believe we require to re-assess how realistic are the academic demands of the Scottish General Teaching Council and the practical expectations which we as a society now have for those we entrust with meeting the needs of our children.

Bill Brown,

46 Breadie Drive, Milngavie.