The 1980s are back; shoulder pads, headbands, ruffle-neck blouses. It’s a well-rehearsed aphorism that fashions repeatedly ‘come round again’, and so if often feels with education policy.

Not run of the industrial mill Superficially there is an element of incongruity that many of the buildings which symbolise Britain’s industrial age have assumed a different monumentality as the homes of art in latter years.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that the Edge Foundation was writing about ‘the rise of the BTEC’ and how this qualification was gaining currency amongst universities on a par with A-levels.

There is definitely an air of pyromania in the National Apprenticeship Service’s latest campaigns to promote apprenticeships.

With the festive season in mind, I recently read that for each of the world’s two billion children to receive one toy at Christmas, Santa’s elves would need to produce four toys per hour, 16 hours a day, 364 days a year and it would require a work force of around 85,851.