When Sir Richard Livingstone can write of an overall shortage
of entrants into the teaching profession, " overall " in this context appearing to mean precisely nothing, my little crusade against this pestilential adjective seems doomed at the outset. But I hope and believe that Sir Richard was quoting from someone else and that the phrase was not of his own coining. However that may be, his letter in Tuesday's Times on assistant-masters' salaries is un- answerably cogent. If you want first-class men for the task of getting the best out of the rising generation, you must pay them something approximating to what they would get if they selected another profession. And an ultimate high-water mark of £655 outside the London area does not come anything near what a first-class man would be earning by the age of 55 or 6o in business
or medicine, in law or the civil service. To get teaching on the cheap is about the most wasteful course a nation anxious to hold its own in the world could pursue. It is perfectly true, of course, that a certain number of assistant-masters get headmasterships. They do not live in affluence even then ; and a little elementary mathe- matics will show that only a small proportion of assistant-masters can ever become heads. The Burnham Scale simply will not do.
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