Ms Millett is anxious to widen the pool for recruitment to include more people from business and industry. The agency is taking over the former licensed teacher scheme designed to attract graduates with work experience into teaching. The second is to remedy shortages in particular subjects, such as maths and science, where recruitment difficulties are endemic. The first is that, as the recession eases, graduates are likely to find other jobs more attractive than teaching.

Ms Millett prefers to call the post “programme co-ordinator”. He or she will have an advisory committee on recruitment responsible for promoting teaching in schools, universities and industry. There will also be a hotline on which prospective teachers will be able to talk to someone with teaching experience about joining the profession.It may seem odd to be worrying about teacher recruitment at a time when a quarter of all newly-qualified teachers cannot find jobs but there are two reasons for doing so. This year’s report from Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector said standards for seven-to-11-year-olds were causing most concern and suggested that many teachers did not know enough to teach effectively.The solution, Ms Millett says, lies in more in-service training. She is interested in the idea of a national scheme for all teachers, similar to the one that has already been introduced for heads.Her plans to improve the image of teachers are also ambitious. The idea of a new “chief contractor” charged with brushing up teachers’ image caused some amusement when it was first revealed. Year on year they carry forward the best of which they are capable of doing for young people.”Besides, she argues, it would be difficult for teachers’ trainers to promote a particular philosophy now that the criteria of governing training courses are so strict.She believes the issue is not whether teachers are trendy or otherwise but the fact that some teachers do not have enough specialist knowledge to teach their subjects.

Nor does she believe schools are full of new teachers whose heads have been crammed with progressive ideas.”Research shows that new teachers revert to teaching how they themselves were taught rather than how they were taught in their training,” she says.”I don’t recognise the notion of all these trendy teachers Teachers are a conservative bunch of people. Far from seeing teachers and teacher trainers as the enemy, the agency’s new chief executive, Anthea Millett, believes it is her job to advance the status of teachers and promote teaching. The agency, therefore, would help to wrest teacher training from the influence of university left-wingers.It may not, however, fulfil the role that some of its promoters intended. But the organisation is a talisman for the right, which has long believed that teacher-training departments are hot-beds of progressive ideas. College lecturers, their argument goes, are foisting these on their students who are, in their turn, wrecking schools by their failure to attend to the three Rs.