licensing teachers should be welcome news to anyone who cares about education.

Setting minimum standards for teachers, in the same way that lawyers and accountants must meet a set standard, sends a strong message to the whole community that their children should be receiving an acceptable and known quality of teaching.

There are questions concerning the licences which have not yet been answered, the most important of which is what the standard will be. Setting the bar too low will achieve nothing; making it too high, or putting too much weight on academic qualifications and not enough on the ability of teachers to perform in a classroom setting, is dangerous too.

The latter is a major challenge; the ability to place ideas in students minds so that they stay there is hard to quantify, except by measuring students' results over a relatively long period of time.

But Sen. Scott, his Ministry, principals and the Bermuda Union of Teachers will have to settle on an acceptable method of judging this standard. There are many veteran teachers who may not have the academic qualifications of their younger colleagues but are magnificent in the classroom.

The second aspect of the licensing process is the ability of the Ministry or the schools to get rid of teachers who do not reach the licensing standard.

This is vital. Not everyone is cut out to be a teacher and those who cannot perform, or who become burned out, need to be moved out before they do any more damage. There has been a habit in the local education world to move bad teachers from school to school, or to give them glorified sinecures in the Education Department. That has to stop.

School principals, who work more closely with their teachers than the Education Ministry, must have a say in determining who makes the cut and Sen.

Scott also needs to be careful not to add any more to the cumbersome education bureaucracy which lumbers along on Point Finger Road.

Principals in turn must be accountable to their school governing bodies and the Ministry of Education.

Sen. Scott deserves credit for getting the ball rolling on licensing. It will not be easy to get the process right, but it is a move in the right direction.

FEED THE GOAT! EDT Feed the Goat! Footballer Shaun Goater is rightly getting a good deal of credit for his role in helping Manchester City win promotion to the UK Premiership, and his success is taking some of the bitterness out of Bermuda's early exit from the World Cup.

All Bermudians should take pride when a countryman shines abroad. Mr. Goater had already done that and his star could shine even more brightly next season, assuming he is able to keep his place against the tougher defences of one of the world's greatest football leagues.

Even if he fails to do so, he has been an inspiration and has shown what hard work and talent can do.

Perhaps the most important lesson he can teach this community is about dedication. Even when things were not going his way and he was toiling in the lower reaches of the Football League, Mr. Goater did not complain, but kept on working and improving. This season that dedication and focus paid off and for that we take our (Maine Road blue) hats off to Shaun Goater.