The educational New Year dawned this week in Kirklees, host of the North of England conference. (“Home of Last of the Summer Wine” says the local education authority - but known as Huddersfield to the rest of us.) Education and Skills Secretary Estelle Morris arrived today to launch the Government’s programme for 2002.

With a second major Education Bill winging its way through Parliament and a lot of targets hanging over the Government’s head, it looks as if the rate of change and pressures to perform will continue to mount. Some of the targets will be met and some of them won’t (see box). But, even if the Government fails to deliver its promises, Ms Morris will not be leaving the scene - unlike other familiar figures.

Almost every other post at the top of the education establishment will have a new incumbent by the end of the year. David Hargreaves, chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, goes next Monday, leaving chairman Sir William Stubbs in temporary charge until a successor is found.

At the Office for Standards in Education, the admired chief inspector Mike Tomlinson is expected to postpone his April departure while the search for his replacement continues. Film producer David Puttnam vacates the chair of the General Teaching Council England in September after three years and has said a serving teacher should replace him (don’t all rush).

The top post at the Standards and Effectiveness Unit of the DFES is to be filled by David Hopkins, professor of education at Nottingham university, following the departure of Michael Barber to run all public services from the Cabinet Office.

In parliament, education ministers will be pushing through a massive and controversial Education Bill in double-quick time. The Bill aims to deregulate the education system, allowing schools freedom to innovate and set up their own companies. But it also gives further incentives to private and voluntary schools to set up their own state-funded independent schools.

The Government plans to get the Bill - all 202 clauses and 22 schedules of it - through its committee stage in nine sessions by January 24. Expect outrage and filibustering over privatisation and the expansion of faith schools.

But the real row over faith schools may come later in the year when ministers issue guidance to local school organisation committees, telling them to make sure faith schools only get state funding if they promise to be inclusive.

A further alternative to the bog standard - the first of the city academies - opens in September.

Teachers will face an interesting test of their professionalism early in the year, when the GTC hears its first disciplinary cases in public. Will teachers be proud they are maintaining their own standards or see this as yet another imposition? And what will the hearings do for their public image?

The Easter teacher union conferences will be seething with discontent over workload, and threats of action if the Government sets no limits. But they may also be a time of misty-eyed nostalgia as Nigel de Gruchy makes positively his last appearance as general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers before moving on to quieter waters as chairman of the Trades Union Congress.

In June the outcome of the Government’s triennial spending review will be announced. Will education get its share of extra spending or will health scoop the pool, as Prime Minister Tony Blair tries to get the National Health Service budget up to European levels?

The pressure to reach literacy and numeracy targets in primary schools will reach fever pitch (with an extra pound;200 million pumped in for encouragement), as will concerns about narrowing the curriculum and teaching to the test. Those concerns will move into secondary schools as the literacy and numeracy strategy takes hold at key stage 3. English teachers especially fear the stifling of creativity.

Citizenship becomes a compulsory subject for all secondary pupils in September. A Green Paper on 14 - 19 qualifications will propose a new vocational GCSE and more mixing of the academic and vocational. No sign that academic GCSEs will disappear in the near future, but at least next year’s league tables will include value-added measures for all schools.

Those poor guinea-pigs who struggled through AS-levels last summer will be the first to sit the second half of their A-levels - A2 - next summer. Will the Government have done enough to prevent a repeat of this year’s exam clashes? This year may be the first time that some students attempt to get into university on the strength of their AS results. What kind of help they will get with funding once they get to university remains unclear, as ministers and advisers continue to bog themselves down on the question of loans and grants.

Independent schools are likely to see another rise in their pupil numbers - even, perhaps, the first rise in boarding numbers for many years as Hogwarts continues to exert its spell. The ever-optimistic independent sector will continue to prod the Government to back a state-funded, open-access scheme.

2002 is Autism Awareness Year, and also the year when the Government’s Special Educational Needs Act and new Code of Practice come into effect. Parents will have greater rights to insist on mainstream schooling for their children. But schools will continue to wonder how much more inclusion they can cope with, as more and more pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties are kept in the mainstream.

By the end of the year, excluded pupils will no longer be roaming the streets but settling down to at least 25 hours of proper education every week. Perhaps.