This is about £50,000 above the going rate.

Parents will be thrilled to know that £50,000 of the money that should annually go on books, equipment and staff will annually be devoted to finding the head a bigger house and nicer clothes and holidays.

And the taxpayer, who has heard much about the credit crunch and felt it, will probably be equally enchanted at the idea of subsidising not education, but a new bonus culture for a member of a privileged minority.

No man or woman with a grain of concern for children and schooling should go near a job which so fatuously inflates their headship salary in relation of those of other heads, and those classroom teachers who actually do the real ground-level work – and for that matter in relation to the salaries of most parents with children in the school's care.

Two prejudices meet in this bizarre idea.

One is the fetishisation of "The Head" at the expense of teachers in general.

The other is the corrupt promotion of the Academy ideology – corrupt because, as elsewhere, it's not being prosecuted by fair-dealing vis-a-vis the existing "community schools", so much as by offers of cash and intensive government grooming of compliant local authorities.

Robert Hull, Elm Grove South, Barnham

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