Labour Minister Randy Horton on Friday dismissed a claim in an editorial in this newspaper was a total capitulation on the part of Government over teachers' pay.

We respectfully disagree. As best as we can tell ? and most requests for further explanation of the deal have been met with "it's very complicated" responses ? the deal will land Government with enormous increases in future financial years.

Indeed, Mr. Horton did not explain the deal in the House, except to say that the teachers did not get everything they wanted.

But Education Minister Terry Lister said they had made "huge strides" towards their goal of parity with civil servants.

If in fact Government did not capitulate, then we are quite happy to admit our error. But so far, no one seems to know what the deal will cost.

More broadly, it seems that the idea of linking pay to civil service levels, or any others, is wrong-headed.

Teaching is a difficult and demanding job and few would question its importance. One of the difficulties teachers face is that there is often little prospect for promotion in the way there is in other organisation. To be sure, it is possible to be come the head of a subject department for a year. But with one principal for 40-plus teachers in many schools, promotion can be grindingly slow.

At the same time, some wonderful teachers make miserable administrators and schools lose out twice as a result. A good classroom teacher is lost and a poor administrator can do untold damage in very little time.

Aside from promotion, the only financial reward for teachers comes from seniority. The longer a teacher sticks it out, the better paid they become. To be sure, seniority does deserve some reward, especially because it can take time for a teacher to really gain confidence on the classroom.

But this does not help the system if a great teacher and a barely competent teacher can expect the same rewards over the course of a career. It is reasonable to assume that the great teacher will eventually leave the system while the mediocre one will keep plodding on towards retirement and a healthy pension.

There must, as a letter writer recently said, be a better way.