Laughs all round for children and parents at home, and another nail in the coffin of the teacher as a respectable professional figure.

Teachers feel under attack. A long overdue contract was finally signed in the summer leaving them worse off than they were in 1990, when the previous contract expired.

Hundreds of schools are currently occupied by pupils - in what has become the traditional season of protests. They are demanding, among other things, better teaching.

Now the media seems to have launched a campaign on standards. “Three teachers and ten kilos of books: but why doesn’t my son learn anything?” read a letter in the upmarket Corriere della Sera, together with a story on the pupil protests entitled “Minister tells off heads: ‘Pupils are right to complain, listen to them’.”

The minister, Giancarlo Lombardi - a jovial former head of the Italian scout movement - believes if you cannot reform the antiquated system (legislation to raise the school-leaving age from 14 to 16 was introduced years ago, but has still to be implemented), you can at least renovate the buildings and the staff.

As budget bargaining gets under way, his priorities are to secure money for school building programmes, for a multi-media room for every school within three years and, especially, money for teacher re-training and re-qualification programmes.

Given the amount of time teachers currently spend on meetings and courses, one wonders how much time will be left for teaching if he gets his way. But since merit payments brought in by the new contract are linked to attending courses, teachers should be queuing to take part.

For one small group of teachers, however, 1995 may be remembered as the year things took a turn for the better.

Some 1,500 language teachers working in the universities tabled a resolution in Strasbourg condemning their employer, the Italian state, after a long history of abuses. Most of them are European Union citizens, many of them British. The resolution was carried with an overwhelming majority. But a new contract hastily drawn up by the government agency in November, though it recognised some of the rights enjoyed by Italian colleagues, attempted to reclassify the language teachers as non-teaching staff and offered a miserably low salary.

With Italy now taking over the presidency of the Community, the contract has become a sensitive political issue and the most likely effect is that the contract will be re-negotiated on more favourable terms to the teachers. If this brings to an end a 10-year dispute, language teaching can only improve.

Italians believe themselves to be among the worst language learners in the world. One of the biggest box-office successes this Christmas is a comedy on the bungling antics of a middle-aged accountant who ends up in a language school in Britain, where he finds himself unable to communicate with the natives. The film’s title is Lo no spik Inglish.