It’s been quite a year. A year of so-called populist politics, when the populace bared its teeth and bit back. Brexit, Trump, the rise of the “alt-right” in the US and closer to home in Europe (ahem, while it is still “home”, that is). There’s no two ways about it, we are at low ebb. We are floundering, seeking an identity and a way to claw ourselves forward.

We can see the fingerprints of populist politics at play in our own sector, too: policy after policy that hasn’t been quite thought through, but which might plausibly be brigaded under a manifesto of “Making Education Great Again”, ends up on the trash heap, quietly canned.

You can always spot the failure of these manoeuvres a mile off, though, as politicians and press officers start talking insistently about the importance of “listening” and being “responsive” and of “revisiting” ideas, while remaining completely, utterly and resolutely committed to the spirit of the plans to [insert policy flavour of the month]. Read: “OK, it’s a fair cop. We cocked it up. RETREAT!”

And to be fair to 2016, this is nothing new. It’s been a bit of a bumper year though. In true X Factor-style, let’s take a little look at the Department for Education’s “best bits”.

ABC of 2016: academisation, baselines and crises

Former education secretary Nicky Morgan deserves special mention on three counts - there are more, but given the constraints of space…First, the reversal on full academisation. Even those of us fully committed to academies knew this one was going to be a ball-ache. Faithfully, we gritted our teeth and trotted out the lines about the benefits of academisation, knowing that we might as well have been expounding the merits of frontal lobotomies. She took to the airwaves to insist again and again that this was not a U-turn, and that the government’s intention for all schools to become academies remained intact. Seriously?

And who can forget the brouhaha around baseline and key stage 1 testing, also during Ms Morgan’s tenure? The KS1 tests were said to have been accidentally leaked. The Standards and Testing Agency pleaded “human error”. Whatever happened, it put the kibosh on the whole endeavour. Baseline testing also fell by the wayside, with the DfE admitting, red-faced, that it simply couldn’t compare different assessments.

Nicky Morgan took to the airwaves to insist again and again that this was not a U-turn, and that the government’s intention for all schools to become academies remained intact. Seriously?

And then, of course, there was the foot-shuffling embarrassment that was the fiasco of the National Teaching Service and Troops to Teachers. The former scheme had ambitions of parachuting some 1,500 teachers into the toughest parts of the country. Only around two dozen teachers have, in fact, accepted places, at the princely sum of £200,000 to find them and assign them. Troops to Teachers has topped this, with an impressive 28 trainees completing the programme since 2014. However, costs here came in at a whopping £4.3 million - about £150,000 per trainee.

Here we are, in the grip of a serious recruitment crisis, and the government is fiddling around in the margins with expensive, bright, shiny programmes that end up being, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a giant waste of taxpayers’ money.

The problem is that DfE ministers and policymakers are so out of step with what the education sector wants and needs. You’d almost respect them more if they just stuck to their guns. But with every U-turn and “policy refinement” they become that bit less credible. It’s the constant flip-flopping that everyone is so fed up with. Politicians and aides are always in a hurry to make their mark. They would be wise to take just a little bit more time to think things through. Absent that, 2017 promises more casualties following on from the fateful policies of 2016. Grammar schools, anyone?

The Secret CEO is the chief executive of a multi-academy trust somewhere in England