One clumsy move, and crash ...He recalls: "You think what is there to be done? You can either keep it going as it is or make it worse. Actually once that initial thought passed and I settled, I realised that what I wanted to do was, without making BBC2 less intelligent, make it more welcoming, to try to get away from the idea it was a rather forbidding place, associated with university lecturers."Apart from a bust of Stalin, his office at BBC Television Centre is refreshingly free of the trappings of media executive power - just the odd juggling ball on a coffee table, a Dr Who tardis biscuit tin and a cuddly BBC2 logo hanging from a window frame."It's very important for BBC2 to be relevant," he says. Under Yentob, BBC2 brimmed with vitality providing a mantelpiece of award-winning shows - Middlemarch, Absolutely Fabulous and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.While virtually anything Yentob did to BBC1 would have been an improvement to a network still screening Eldorado, Jackson was handling the television equivalent of a piece of finely crafted porcelain. However, the gap has steadily closed, and during the first half of this year the channels were level-pegging, with BBC holding a 2 per cent lead at peak time.Jackson was appointed controller of BBC2 in April 1993.

At the age of 35, he was the youngest incumbent since Michael Peacock launched the channel in 1964, aged 34.He inherited from Alan Yentob, now controller of BBC1, a network which by common consent was bold and brilliant. BBC2 was always a forbidding place - a land of men with bad haircuts and sideburns, standing in front of blackboards and speaking in words of not less than four syllables But that has changed. Under intense competitive pressure from Channel 4, the network has given itself a more appealing lick of paint and laid out the mat marked "welcome". And now audiences appear to be returning. With a keen eye on soft spots in its rivals' schedules, Channel 4 pitched aggressively in the daytime with chat and game shows, and at 10 o'clock in the evening with winning US imports such as ER and NYPD Blue, or films.Although continuing to trail BBC2 at peak time, by the end of 1993 Channel 4 had nudged ahead to an 11 per cent share of viewing across the day, compared with BBC2's 10 per cent.It would be wrong to say that alarm bells tinkled at BBC2, where frankly ratings have never been the primary consideration, but this slippage was not the happiest refrain to be heard at the party to celebrate Michael Jackson's first year as the network's controller. A report from the Office of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools..

The training of teachers is crucial if we are to raise standards in the classroom."8 School-centred Initial Teaching Training 1993-4. Indeed, many had been pleased that their children were often in a class that had two teachers.He said some students who would not have started established courses had been attracted to the new ones because they were close to their homes. But he believed the new courses would continue to be for a minority. "If anyone ever thought the scheme was going to be wildly different and that schools would not make use of people like higher education lecturers in training teachers, they were slightly off beam."David Blunkett, Labour's education spokesman, said: "There is a very worrying 10-point gap between the proportion of satisfactory teaching on these courses and that on established college courses.

Last year, there were about 350.The report says that comparisons of the new courses with established ones must be treated cautiously because a high proportion of those on them were being trained in technology, a subject in which overall teaching standards were low.Schools benefited from the enthusiasm of trainees, the report says, but headteachers were worried by the pressure on resources and by time spent by staff away from teaching duties.Mr Tomlinson said headteachers had reported no adverse reaction to the new courses from parents. It is to schools' credit that so much has been achieved in a short time. The proportion of good or very good teachers is lower than we had hoped."He said the school "mentors" who trained the students may have had too low expectations.Around 150 students, about 1 per cent of those doing teacher training, were on school-centred courses in the first year. The two latter - from consortia of schools in London and the West Midlands - have since been re-inspected and judged satisfactory.Michael Tomlinson, director of inspections at the Office for Standards in Education, which published the report, said: "It is a promising if mixed beginning. Students on traditional courses spend 24 of 36 weeks in school.The report says the scheme produces many competent teachers but fewer high quality ones than conventional courses.