This was Jack’s year - in all his many real and fantastical guises. Jack McConnell became Education Minister in the reshuffle after Donald Dewar’s death and left to become First Minister himself when Henry McLeish resigned. He inherited an education service which, like Humpty Dumpty, had fallen off the wall but which, unlike the king’s horses and men, he was able to put back together again. But, what kind of house did Jack build from the pieces?

The McCrone deal Jack’s first task was to climb the beanstalk and slay the giant of teachers’ pay negotiations. At the turn of the year, this saga was still in negotiation with no guarantee of success. Sticking points were salary conservation, the extra 35 hours for professional development, pay levels and the not insignificant problem of funding the whole deal.

Jack got stuck in personally and secured a deal that really needed the hen that laid the golden egg to cover the cost, some pound;900 million over the first three years.

McCrone offered teachers a 21.5 per cent pay rise over three years, shortened the pay scale, reduced the number of grades, put a 35-hour limit on the working week, cut the number of contact hours, offered all teachers the prospect of enhanced “chartered” teacher status - all for the modest return of five extra days (or the equivalent) spent on professional development.

However, before long the giant started to give chase and the problems began to emerge. First up was how the deal affected pay for related jobs - for the directorate, music instructors, advisers and, most problematic, educational psychologists. Then many rural authorities found themselves strapped for cash as funding was allocated on the basis of pupil rather than current teacher numbers,favouring urban authorities with larger schools.

Headteachers were angry at being excluded from national and local negotiating committees, particularly when decisions on what could be included in the 35-hour week were to be decided at school level. It emerged in some areas that teachers were sticking rigidly to the 35- hour maximum, cutting the number of parents’ evenings and even walking out of school when not directly in front of a class. Then towards the end of the year, problems emerged over the starting salary for mature entry students, whether there would be enough teaching posts for the new guaranteed probationary year and whether there would be sufficient funds to implement the package in full.

So, despite all the money, Jack’s lovely new McCrone house has a few cracks - just like a PPP school, it would seem.

The SQA debacle Jack also had to climb the beanstalk to slay the SQA and Higher Still giant.

He took on the education portfolio shortly after the chaos of the 2000 examination diet and many of the problems still had to be resolved. He needed the giant’s bags of money for the extra pound;14million he provided to make the system work. However, his first problem was to settle the continued discontent from the summer. The appeals had not been enough to silence questions about marking standards, so an appeal against the appeals was set up to review the 4,000 most problematic cases. In the end, only 5 per cent of these were granted, thus restoring some confidence in the system and heading off legal challenges.

Then there were the problems building for diet 2001 - a late start, missed deadlines, a 40 per cent increase in data because of an increased uptake in courses, and an ever-growing need for markers when there were already recruitment problems - not forgetting a hostile press just waiting for a chance to pounce and chop down the beanstalk. All this was set against criticism of the Higher Still programme itself, particularly the amount of assessment, with schools and FE colleges proposing different solutions.

So Jack set to work. He raised markers’ pay by 50 per cent. He set up a review body to oversee the 2001 diet and a strategic group to come up with long-term solutions. He bought SQA extra computing capacity, supported staff changes, appointed an exam czar and authorised a consultation on ways to slim down the assessment burden. Over the summer there was a collective holding of breath, but in August all the effort and resources were justified when the results were issued successfully and on time. However, just to make sure everyone was paying attention, the SQA suggested the results showed a 7 per cent improvement, an increase of such unlikely magnitude that even a mathematician like Jack could spot the mistake!

With the success of diet 2001, everyone relaxed. Suddenly there seemed less need for a radical revision of assessment - a subject-by-subject tidy-up was deemed enough by many. Several of the hard-working people at the SQA left and new ones had to be recruited, the exam czar stood down, and the incoming Minister decided to hand over responsibility to her deputy.

Jack’s SQA house looks good, but it’s not clear that its foundations are sound.

The inspectors So what did Jack need the harp for? Last year he climbed the beanstalk to slay the discord created by the perceived conflict in the policy-setting and policy-checking roles of the HMI. He hived them off into an independent agency, gave them a clear role of monitoring the system and used the harp to accompany the choruses of praise. Yes, Douglas Osler is still in charge, just a lot quieter than before. HMI may have gone underground, but they have also became much more pervasive as they have started naming and shaming local authorities.

Funnily enough, a bad authority report does not prompt the same counter-chorus of support that a bad school report usually does.

Money The year was awash with money - not just for teachers’ pay and for the SQA, but also for school buildings. Suddenly, through public private partnerships, there was the prospect of a land filled with new, purpose-built schools.

The Glasgow version, which saw all secondary schools refurbished or rebuilt, came in for a barrage of criticism about loss of facilities, classrooms that were too small and lost computers, with the added excitement of collapsing ceilings, leaking water pipes and shorting power lines. Nothing daunted, councils everywhere started falling over themselves to get on the PPP gravy train, even when it required them to bite the bullet and close half-empty schools.

There were also cases of disappearing money. The Chancellor of the Exchequer did one of his magic tricks and produced money for school books and equipment. When this money crossed the Border, it somehow got stuck to the Executive for rather a long time and seemed to shrink in the process.

Meanwhile, Scottish Borders Council found a lot of money had disappeared into a black hole. They discovered a pound;3.9 million deficit on their education budget and it wasn’t long before officials started to follow the money into the black hole.

Further education colleges also found a financial black hole and many spent the year struggling to get out of debt.

Despite endless recovery plans and pound;214 million in largesse from their fairy godmother, Wendy Alexander, the number of colleges in debt is set to rise from 34 to 37 (out of 47) in the coming year.

Sex education The clause 28 debate had swept through 2000 like a tropical storm and just a few after-ripples remained in 2001. The long-promised sex education guidelines were finally published, but only after Jack the Lad had insisted on giving a higher prominence to marriage - which has a certain irony in the light of subsequent confessions.

However, while most of Scotland settled back to the normal situation of not talking about sex with the children, the Christian Institute Scotland stoked the flames with a publication of selected items from various teaching resources and claimed this was the curriculum for children. Do we have a candidate for wicked fairy here?

Children No fairy story is complete without children and the focus on children, first evident in 2000, continued apace. All schools were required under the Education Act to set up pupil councils and a number of authorities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh extended this by seeking children’s views at authority level.

Pupils had been such a hit giving evidence on Higher Still to the parliamentary enquiry that they were included in the Ministerial review group overseeing diet 2000. At the other end of the system, teachers were urged to consult three and four-year-olds over nursery provision by allowing toddlers to photograph what was important to them. That’s all nursery teachers dressed as Bob the Builder, then. Meanwhile the Parliament’s education committee has taken up the idea of a Children’s Commissioner and is currently considering how to develop it further.

Discipline SADLY, not all children are angels. Bad behaviour by pupils was a recurrent theme at teacher union conferences and a national survey showed a considerable rise in the incidence of violence against teachers. Worse for the Executive was that, despite a target to cut exclusions, these rose by 4 per cent in 1999-2000 to 38,769.

Jack again rolled up his sleeves and got stuck in. He chaired a discipline task force which issued a report in June. This focused on providing support and advice to head off problems before they got out of hand. It proposed special units for children with real difficulties, offering support to parents and involving all pupils in developing school behaviour codes. Extra money was provided to support new initiatives, but exclusion was to remain a legitimate, if last resort, tool.

Following the stushie over Deputy Education Minister Nicol Stephen being given responsibility for schools, a dose of discipline turned out to be the subject of his boss Cathy Jamieson’s first official school visit (“Education Minister in school visit shock”?). She went to Tynecastle High in Edinburgh earlier this month to announce pound;14 million for an action plan.

Ghost pupils After good children and bad children, we had “ghost” children. At the start of the year, several schools were accused of inflating their pupil numbers, which they put into the authority for funding purposes, above the number of actual bums on seats. Warnings and discipline actions flew around, but after various witch hunts and diverting press headlines, the issue subsided with few serious injuries.

Ghost schools While some schools had ghost pupils, Highland had ghost schools.

Glenborrodale and Assynt primaries were mothballed for two years as they had no pupils.

Virtual classrooms The magic of the virtual world continued to hold sway, with schemes to provide every pupil with a computer competing with schemes to use ICT to check on pupils’ attendance. There were computers for teachers, cyber-cafes and proposals to link all schools to a central curriculum service using broadband communication.

There was a new programme for teaching Advanced Higher on-line and an online election by primary pupils to select the 100 greatest Scots of the last century - that’s the 20th century to readers of a certain age. However, the real discovery, which had the surprise value of a pantomime ending, was that pupils’ ICT skills outstripped those of teachers.

Movers and shakers Jack’s support cast of players was ever changing. Among the new kids on the block were Karen Gillon as chair of the parliamentary education committee; Matthew MacIver as chief executive of the General Teaching Council for Scotland; and Sandy Fowler as president of the EIS. David Fraser moved from the NHS to head the SQA and, of course, Cathy Jamieson who has come from a social work background to be the new Education Minister.

Farewells were bid to Willis Pickard, who stood down from the editor’s post at The TESS after almost a quarter of a century; Dennis Gunning, who left the SQA for a similar post - but hopefully not similar problems - in Victoria, Australia; and Danny McCafferty, who lost his post as COSLA education spokesperson following dark deeds in his home authority of West Dunbartonshire. There was a final farewell to Cardinal Winning who died suddenly in June.

On the awards front, Douglas Osler was given a papal knighthood for services to Catholic Education; Chris l’Anson, a peripatetic teacher of percussion in North Ayrshire, was named Yamaha Scottish Instrumental Teacher; Tracy Wallace, of Queen Margaret Academy, Ayr, won an award as Scotland’s top female computing student; and HMI Duncan MacQuarrie was awarded a Comenius Fellowship for his work with Gaelic.

Political science There was a general election for the UK Parliament at Westminster, but few noticed and schools were very sluggish in signing up for the mock elections compared to their response in 1999 at the time of the Scottish Parliament vote.

School sagas Two long-running sagas hit the news. St Mary’s Episcopal Primary in Dunblane continued to fight incorporation into Stirling Council and the Western Isles Council finally voted to merge Stornoway’s Lews Castle School and Nicolson Institute. Meanwhile, the merger between Laurel Park and Hutchesons’ Grammar caused war to break out among the well-heeled inhabitants of Glasgow. However, the parents could not stop this private deal going ahead, unlike their state counterparts in Aberdeen who were quite successful in reviewing a merger between St Machar’s and Linksfield.

Modern languages THEyear saw the long-awaited report by the committee set up to find ways to halt the decline in the uptake of modern languages at Higher level. Its solution was to stop making modern languages compulsory until S4 and instead to say that all youngsters had an “entitlement” to six years of language teaching. However, many schools interpreted moving from compulsion to entitlement as meaning “optional”. We’ll have to wait to see if it works.

Meanwhile, attempts to extend Gaelic medium education, an issue loudly supported by the SNP’s Mike Russell, ran into the familiar problem of teacher shortage. Lews Castle College started a training course and Highland Council decided to train six primary teachers a year to provide Gaelic as a second language in non-Gaelic medium schools.

Really Big Ideas Throughout the year, the Big Ideas were raising attainment and social inclusion, with much muttering that these were incompatible objectives. Later came news that the search was to be launched for Really Big Ideas as the Executive revealed plans for a great debate on school education.

Raising attainment meant a continuing focus on examination results, which remained depressingly static despite all the money spent developing Higher Still. However, there was good news as the Executive exceeded its target of 50 per cent of pupils progressing to college or university (now 52 per cent) and the latest international comparisons showed Scotland - as part of the UK - in the top 10.

On the social inclusion front, there were a number of interesting initiatives such as new community schools and Glasgow’s learning communities. The jury is still out on how successful these will be but more recent evidence from Glasgow shows that the most disadvantaged group with social, educational and behavioural difficulties still gets a rough deal. Meanwhile, assessment of the three-year old early years’ initiative showed that it had raised standards, but that the gap between the top and the bottom remained the same.

In his final days as Minister, Jack McConnell said that “closing the gap” would be his objective for 2002. Cathy Jamieson has inherited that aim and it will be next year’s job to evaluate her success. However, it is worth remembering that the tortoise only caught the hare because the hare fell asleep.