With reference to last week's front page article, teaching in today's much more hostile climate makes many people 'sick', however, many potential teachers see the warning signs, and head off into other employment.

Throughout some 40 years of teaching, in both independent and state schools, with utter bewilderment I have witnessed the strategic role of teaching being made ever more hazardous and psychologically damaging as society, through a succession of failed governments, has removed from school governors and headteachers virtually all effective power to command proper, socially desirable, standards of behaviour.

They are often left with just the useless, and evil, recourse to permanent exclusion.

As today's Times newspaper reports - from the University of Birmingham's Professor Kenneth Browne's study, due to be published in The Lancet this weekend - the ever increasing visual content of much that is available for schoolchildren on "video film, satellite and cable TV, allows children to access violent media inappropriate to their age... carelessness with material that contains extreme violence and sexual imagery might even be regarded as a form of emotional child maltreatment".

Disastrously, society is not yet prepared to open its eyes and to once more to empower schools to demand both high standards of behaviour and of co-operation with staff.

Brian Stowe, Grange Road, Malvern.