To anybody who has worked in or followed education over the past 30 years, it will come as no surprise that this term starts with schools facing serious teacher shortages. Come economic boom - in the early 1970s, the late 1980s and, now, the turn of the century - come teacher shortages, particularly in science and maths, and particularly in London.

When employment is plentiful, many qualified teachers, as well as graduate trainees, can find jobs that involve less stress and higher pay. When house prices surge, teachers (and other public sector workers) cannot afford to live in the capital. All this is common sense, yet governments are invariably taken by surprise. Ministers will have spent some of the pre-boom years kicking teachers around, safe in the knowledge that, at such times, the profession offers a safe haven from economic recession. Then at the height of the boom - with schools appointing staff without interviewing them, with local education authority officers jetting to the far corners of the Earth in search of emergency stop-gaps, with children tuning in to the twang of Antipodean supply teachers - we get a flurry of recruitment "initiatives", of which Labour's offer of "salaries" to graduates during training is the latest example.

But a trained teacher is no guarantee of a body in the classroom. And teachers' pay is only part of the answer. If the depressing cycle is not to go on for ever, ministers must tackle teacher status and esteem. Tony Blair has at last accepted what ought to have been blindingly obvious to a Labour leader from the moment he came to power: that Britain has suffered for decades from underinvestment in its public services. The result was the summer's comprehensive spending review, with its generous allocations to education, health and transport. Ministers need to go a step further and accept that Britain also suffers from low morale among its public service providers - among doctors, social workers and police officers, for example, as well as teachers.

What all these occupations suffer from is a siege mentality, a sense that they are under attack from both public and government. While courts threaten teachers with imprisonment if they lay a finger on an aggressive child, the chief inspector of schools never ceases to insist that they are lowering standards (and, if the exam results say the contrary, the exams themselves must have got easier). Teachers and other public sector workers feel excluded from the zeitgeist, from a world that values initiative, enterprise, innovation and creativity.

The public sector is not naturally rich in such attributes. By their nature, public bodies rarely reward risk-taking or enterprise; as their watchwords are accountability and equity, rather than profit, their instinct is to value those who apply rules most rigidly and meticulously. Reliability is a greater virtue than imagination. In private business, initiative and flexibility are at a premium, partly because capitalism depends on new ideas and new products, partly because making a sale to the individual customer is all that matters. The public sector has no such imperatives; it serves a collective master - the taxpayer or the government - which expresses its preferences collectively, through parliamentary acts and ministerial regulations.

The paradox is that, in trying to change the public sector, Tory and Labour governments alike have magnified its faults. Set targets for schools, ran the theory, and teachers would stretch themselves and their pupils, using ingenuity and imagination to scale new heights. In practice, the opposite has happened. The targets are set down in such detail - and the monitoring of their achievement is so assiduous - that teachers are now less able to exercise individual initiative than they have ever been. Moreover, ministers have staked their political futures on the achievement of targets and, therefore, begun to specify how to meet them, as David Blunkett has done with literacy and numeracy. One of the attractions of teaching in the past was that it didn't have a rule book; local education authorities and schools then buzzed with enterprise and innovation. That would now be dismissed as 1960s trendiness.

What faces anybody considering teaching, therefore, is not just poor pay, low status and high blame, but excessive paperwork, rigid rules and minimal autonomy. Even if teachers wanted to join the enterprise culture, the heavy hands of Ofsted and the education department discourage risk-taking. No wonder there is a flight from the classroom when the job market offers better opportunities.

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