The statements by Zenna Atkins, chair of Ofsted, that “Every school should have a useless teacher”, and that “If kids” (by which she presumably means children) “can manage to cope with one bad teacher, that’ll be a good learning lesson for them in life” is a distortion of truly Orwellian proportions.

It is reminiscent of phrases such as “War is peace”, “Freedom is slavery”, and – as is most apposite in this context – “Ignorance is strength”, which are all to be found within the pages of Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four.

And what is even more horrifying is that Big Brother – or in this case ‘Big Sister’ – someone who purports to be an educationalist – actually appears to believe her own words, and in doing so, confesses to all and sundry that she is prepared to sacrifice the educational standards of the pupils of Britain.

Does she also believe, for example, that every hospital medical school should deliberately recruit a bad teacher, or that every airline should deliberately recruit a bad pilot?

If Orwell were alive today, what a wealth of new material he would have for another, entitled, say, Twenty Eighty-Four!

Dr Andrew Norman, Hurst Hill, Poole, Dorset