So another new year heaves its bloated self into position.
Farewell to all that Christmas over-indulgence; now it's time to clear our minds and get into reflective shape for a new year that looks as if it's going to contain several rather newer ingredients than most.
Even a few days into 2010 lots of pundits are in Mystic Meg mode, making vexed predictions about when the election might be called and who might get in. Based on these past few newborn days, it's a task, I suspect, we may begin to tire of in just a matter of weeks. Or days. Or minutes. A sixth-month election campaign is suddenly looking a little tiresome.
Yet amid all the uncertainty of our future political leadership, one thing seems definite: the money's dried up. We're at the end of an exceptional period of spending on education, and it would be churlish for any of us not to acknowledge the 'education, education, education' commitment that Tony Blair made and then matched by getting out the national wallet.
Whereas we used to take decaying schools and lackluster classrooms as the norm, we now see how shameful it was for one of the top five industrial nations to have had expectations so shabbily low. Government spending and initiatives since 1997 have helped us to raise our sense of what high quality education should look like.
But now, there's a chill wind blowing our way.
And that's where I worry about the populist 'frontline' argument. This has a feel-good quality to it. 'We won't cut teacher numbers. What we'll do is reduce the bureaucrats and administrators,' say some politicians.
This has the smack of commonsense about it. For many people, what educations needs – indeed, means – is teachers.
Take maths, which now has special emphasis alongside English because of the way schools are judged at GCSE. From watching lots of maths lessons over the past year, it's shown me something I'd never previously twigged.
It's that for some pupils the biggest problem in their maths lessons isn't their ability or talent; it's not even necessarily anything to do with their (lack of) numeracy; it's their self-esteem, their self-belief. And what can make those things worse is their teacher. Bizarrely – a maths teacher is the last thing some pupils need.
Someone who's good at maths, who thinks in terms of right versus wrong answers, who expects pupils to give their responses aloud, in front of others – that person can be the problem. No offence to great maths teachers – sometimes some students will only really learn from someone other than a qualified maths teacher.
Teaching assistants, other adults, mentors – if we've learnt anything in the past decade it's that whilst teachers are sometimes the solution, they're also sometimes the problem. For some students, after 10 years or so of formal schooling, they will learn best from someone who isn't their teacher.
So when we hear talk about cutting all but the frontline services, let's be quick to defend adults other than teachers – the mentors, coaches, teaching assistants and HLTAs, and all the others who have shown us that quality teaching isn't solely the domain of teachers. Sometimes it's about attitude and experience, and not just about a teaching qualification.
Which is why as the new age of austerity begins to bite, we'll need to be a bit more subtle in our thinking – preserving a workforce which is based on the best needs of all our pupils and not on the more simplistic employment patterns that may have prevailed in our own misty past.
Geoff Barton is Headteacher of King Edward VI School, Suffolk, and a NET Leading Thinker.
