One does not need to admire the teachers' unions, some of which no doubt opposed the end of dame schools and the advent of pencil and paper in classrooms, to ask why their members seem to be in a perpetual state of disgruntlement. True, the unions' Easter conferences, with their threats of boycotts and walkouts, are little more than ritual, rather like the washing of feet, distribution of coins and other ancient customs that go on at this time of year. Many of the delegates' proposals for action will be rejected in membership ballots if union leaders do not find an excuse simply to ignore them. The temptation for ministers is to observe that only very peculiar people would want, after a term in the classroom, to spend their holidays in Harrogate listening to speeches. Ministers may conclude that the delegates are unrepresentative.

But that is only half true. The union conferences are an accurate gauge of the mood of members if not of their appetite for industrial action. And "fed up" is a fairly accurate summary of that mood: half of all new teachers desert the classroom within five years of starting. Here are some of the main reasons why.

First, many schools are now joyless places: art, music, drama, games, outings, camps, parties, concerts, even playtimes have suffered from the enormous pressures created by national tests, by schools' anxieties about their positions in the league tables of results and by the terror of inspection. Health and safety concerns - woe betide any teacher who sips a hot cup of coffee near a child - and various forms of "political correctness" further stamp on the idea that any kind of fun or spontaneity might be permitted.

Second, teachers feel de-professionalised. The government prescribes not only the content of maths and English but also how these subjects are taught. The culture of prescription and inspection has permeated deeply into schools, which are now more commonly run on command-and-control lines than in the old collegiate style. Teachers are expected to produce detailed lesson plans and detailed accounts of how they turned out, a chore that now has a higher priority in many schools than actually marking children's work. Paradoxically, the government thinks it is enhancing teachers' professional status by providing them with lower-paid assistants to perform routine tasks such as photocopying and mounting wall displays and, on occasion, to take classes for straightforward work determined in advance by teachers. But all this does, in teachers' eyes, is to devalue further the basic classroom work for which most of them joined the profession and in which they were trained. Ministers and civil servants do not entirely grasp that not everybody wants to be a bureaucrat, sitting behind a desk shuffling paper.

Third, teachers now believe not only that they are undervalued (they always did think that) but also that they are despised. Ministers seem unable to break free from the Thatcherite mindset that public sector workers should be objects of suspicion, likely to be enjoying long tea breaks at taxpayers' expense and conspiring to cover up each other's incompetence. Thus, Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education, having secured funds to improve school leadership (and hardly anyone who has been near a school would deny that needs improving), then demands hit lists of senior staff that local authorities propose to sack before he will release the money. The idea that teachers deserve a good kicking has spread to parents, who, in some schools, now offer quite frightening levels of physical and verbal abuse.

There are many other grievances: the exacting achievement targets that are set, usually for schools in disadvantaged areas, and which David Bell, the chief of inspector of schools, has admitted often act more as sticks than as carrots; the frequent failure of school governors and local authorities to support teachers who are physically attacked by pupils or parents; the growing use of overseas teachers, many of them not fully qualified, to fill staffing gaps.

Many of these points may well be dismissed as the sort of whinges that you would hear from any professional group. Ministers may reasonably argue that they were elected to serve parents and children, not teachers, and that their reforms have raised standards of literacy and numeracy with results that are clear in the latest international comparisons. But no industry can survive indefinitely with an alienated workforce, and particularly not education. Many schools give out to the next generation the message that teaching is for mugs and losers. Labour, once the teachers' natural political ally, needs to repair its relations with the profession.

Those dreary steeples again

It is usual, as a war ends, to list "the stories you missed" and to lament how some scandal or disaster, which could have enthralled us, was ignored. But it may be more useful, if in worse taste, to list the stories we would now be spared if the Republican Guard had shown more backbone and the war had continued another few weeks. We would not have to worry about the threat of yet another global epidemic with its "mystery virus" spreading, as always, from the inscrutable east. We would not be compelled to intrude once more on Liz Hurley's privacy and could allow her, away from the public gaze, to find true love with the Unsuitable Boy from Bombay. We would not need to strive again to divine Gerry Adams's meaning as he tells us an IRA statement is "clear". Which reminds us that Churchill must have felt the same way after the First World War, when he contemplated again the "dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone".

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