As we near the end of eighth week, a collective sigh of relief can be felt reverberating through the Oxford air. As snow lightly dusted our fair city and a wintry chill established itself as a permanent fixture, hats, gloves, and scarves became required garments in every student’s wardrobe ensemble, and all the holiday decorations I’ve been blathering about began to seem just a little more relevant.

And with the holidays here came an institution which I thought I was familiar with, but in fact turned out to feel quite foreign – the seemingly innocuous traditional Christmas carol service. Before any gasps escape from open mouths, let me hasten to assure you that I do indeed enjoy my fair share of Christmas tunes. But my expectations are more in the line of Jingle Bells, Winter Wonderland, Frosty the Snowman, and that good old standby Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

I was surprised, upon opening the pamphlets provided at college and university carol services, that these were not the songs soon to pierce the air. While I certainly recognize hymns of the season, Hark! The Herald Angels and Little Town of Bethlehem and all, they don’t comprise the soundtrack of the holiday season as much back home as they do here.

This difference begged a related query, which I proceeded to pose to friends; were our holiday books, or films, in fact divergent as well? They assured me that they had indeed been introduced to the wonderfully corny delights of The Santa Clause and The Polar Express (though many were shocked to hear that the latter derived from a classic children’s book). And of course it goes both ways, as I can attest to viewings of Love, Actually and The Holiday.

But when I probed further, beyond the holiday tales of recent vintage, I found that there were what I considered gaping holes in the holiday canon. I grew up reading (and then viewing) How The Grinch Stole Christmas, a classic Dr. Seuss tale whether in book, cartoon, or feature film form. I’m used to marathons of A Christmas Story every December, with Ralphie’s quest ostensibly ageless. Going back further in creation date, Miracle on 34th Street and It’s A Wonderful Life (a personal favourite) elicited some recognition, but nowhere near the level I expected.

As in all other seasons, and on all other occasions, the carol service reminded me that there are assumptions that just can’t be made when one is speaking in an American tongue. The one consolation is that on both sides of the pond, one can feel free to wish everyone else (including those of you reading this), a happy holiday season and New Year.

Michael Gove should be one of the heroes of this government. His determination to fix Britain’s broken education system is beyond admirable, and the scale of his plans is beyond ambitious. Much of Gove’s work is long overdue, and should be welcomed with open arms. Some of it, however, needs to be urgently rethought.

Gove has, despite incredible bad luck (see Building Schools for the Future fiasco), done a rather good job. He managed to safeguard the education budget in a last minute rescue attempt, and reallocate funding where it is most needed via the pupil premium. In the education white paper he included plans to allow teachers to, for the first time in years, teach. The National Curriculum will shrink from a dictatorial control freak into a sensibly sized set of learning goals — laying out what pupils should learn, not how teachers should teach it. He included plans to put individual schools and teachers at the heart of disciplinary policy, and give them the discretion necessary to do what’s best for their community of pupils as a whole.

He also scrapped EMA. Though we can all cite the rich friend who get EMA through some obscure loophole and spent it on Smirnoff Ice at bad underage clubs, EMA serves an important purpose. The decision of whether to do A-levels, and which ones to do, determines a child’s future. Pupils whose parents cannot afford to give them an allowance, or who need to financially contribute to the running of their home, face an incredibly tough decision. In some cases this will lead to them dropping out of education altogether, or taking easier subjects to give them time to work longer hours at their job.

EMA is not a perfect system. Paying it direct to students has proven a clear mistake, and payments instead should be sent direct to parents. This doesn’t mean that the all important helping hand it gives to poorer students isn’t worthwhile though. The opportunity cost of Sixth Form is, for many people, remarkably high. Bringing it down will help students from less fortunate backgrounds get more university places, at better universities. If we care about social mobility this is one thing that should not be scrapped.

Gove also scrapped school sport. Here it is hard to see why so much has to be sacrificed for so little gain. The £162 million saved is only just more than the £120 million we spend on debt interest each day, yet the consequence is to hit both health and education. Tales of Cabinet showdowns have detailed ministerial concerns over the health of schoolchildren, and how scrapping the budget for exercise while obesity is rising might not be the best of ideas.

There’s another important problem though. Most of our schoolchildren, despite Jamie Oliver’s best efforts, still survive on an unhealthy high sugar diet. Pupils who snack for breakfast and spend their lunch break munching on sugar are inevitably hyperactive and disruptive in the classroom. The longer they sit still in behind a desk and then at home in front of the television, the worse their behaviour will be. School sport is a great way of breaking the cycle. No pupil who’s just played a proper football match has the energy to disrupt a classroom. Better than unleash the hyperactivity during maths, pupils should be getting rid of it on the sports field.