Sean Coughlan

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The more things change... the more things stay the same.

A revolution has been announced for GCSEs in England, with tougher exams, a more stretching syllabus, no hiding behind coursework and standards that are higher than anything since the demise of the O-levels in the 1980s.

But the results - give or take a fraction of a percentage point - are uncannily similar to last year.

How does that happen?

Of course, the most important thing about GCSE results is the individual pupils, their families and teachers.

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The long-running battle over grammar schools - put back into the deep freeze after the general election result - saw deep-rooted divisions over the impact of dividing pupils by academic ability.

Opponents argued that academic selection really became social selection - and that what appeared to be selection by ability became a filter shaped by social background.

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"This is only going to end one way," says Lord Adonis, Labour peer and one of the architects of an earlier version of tuition fees.

"Almost no-one inside or outside government thinks they will survive."

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University tuition fees in England have become a political battleground - with renewed calls that they should be scrapped.

When they were increased a few years ago to £9,000 they became a literal battleground, with activists clashing with police on the streets around Westminster.

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Food banks are an intensely divisive image, an uncomfortable underbelly of austerity often in touching distance of conspicuous wealth.

They seem hard to explain - and Theresa May stumbled awkwardly when asked about them during the election campaign, getting no further than saying they were used by people for "complex reasons".

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Did Michael Gove really try to stop schools in England from teaching about climate change in geography?

His ministerial return, as secretary of state for the environment, food and rural affairs, has prompted a wave of claims that Mr Gove tried to remove the teaching of climate change when he was in charge of the education department.

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Scrapping tuition fees in England is the biggest and most expensive proposal in Labour's £25bn worth of pledges for education.

Instead of fees rising to £9,250 per year in the autumn, Jeremy Corbyn is proposing a complete handbrake turn in saying that university tuition should not cost students anything.

"Poverty is stitched into the system," says Lord Bird, the outspoken and larger-than-life Big Issue founder and campaigner on homelessness.

But he has plans to unpick it - and says he has been in talks with Theresa May about a new approach to tackling poverty if she is re-elected as prime minister.

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Michael Ignatieff is not a person you would expect to find at the centre of a global political power play featuring names such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

He was the rangy intellectual presenter on late night TV arts shows of the early 1990s in the UK, who looked like he might moonlight in an experimental jazz band.

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If news stories could have a soundtrack, then this scrapping of tests in the early years of primary school would have the creaking sound of a pendulum slowly swinging back.

The Department for Education is proposing that national curriculum tests taken by seven-year-olds in England could be ditched.