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He’s back! After a year away from education, in which he lost a job as a public relations consultant and his pound;100,000 contract as a writer for the Daily Telegraph was not renewed, the former chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead has accepted a position as professor of education at the University of Buckingham, Britain’s only private university. Mr Woodhead will not reveal his salary and will only say that it will be paid by a nameless “private foundation” (if his contract is anything like fellow Buckingham professor Dennis O’Keeffe he will be paid according to the money he attracts in research grants). Whatever the financial arrangements, however, we are sure Woodhead will be warmly welcomed by a research community he once castigated as being “an irrelevance and a distraction” in all staffrooms across the country.