In the news: David Miliband

Wunderkind David Miliband this week replaced Stephen Timms as a minister of state in the Department for Education and Skills. Landing with the kind of thump one would expect of a heavyweight thinker, he lends intellectual gravitas to the department.

Oxford graduate and Massachusetts Institute of Technology postgraduate, former fellow of the Institute for Public Policy Research and ex-head of the No 10 policy unit are just a few of Mr Miliband's achievements.

His intelligence, not to mention bespectacled youthful looks (he is 36), earned him the policy-unit nickname of "Brains" after the puppet character in the 1960s series Thunderbirds .

Indeed, the Milibands are a bright bunch. His late father, Ralph, was a leading political scientist, professor at the London School of Economics and influential leftwing thinker. His brother Ed is a top policy wonk and number-cruncher at the Treasury.

But whether synaptic superiority prepares Mr Miliband as an education minister is another matter.

It was unclear as The THES went to press whether Mr Miliband would inherit Mr Timms's school-standards brief unchanged or whether portfolios would be reshuffled. But if he does, he will soon learn it can be a be treacherous brief. Trouble over teachers' pay and recruitment spring to mind immediately.

The experience could prove bruising. After all, Mr Miliband's rise to prominence as an arch Blairite has been suitably pain-free.

He was, as they say, parachuted into the ultra-safe Labour seat of South Shields for the last election when former cabinet minister David Clark resigned.

Mr Miliband brings to the education department a deep commitment to social justice that ought to fit well with the similar commitment to equality demonstrated by his perhaps less academically qualified new boss Estelle Morris.