By Gary Eason Education editor, BBC News Website

Former Cabinet Office Minister Ruth Kelly has taken the helm as education secretary in the reshuffle sparked by David Blunkett's resignation.

What awaits her as she prepares to step into the new home secretary Charles Clarke's shoes?

Ruth Kelly was educated at private schools and Oxford University

Top of Ruth Kelly's in-tray when she gets to the Department for Education and Skills will be What To Do About Tomlinson.

Mike Tomlinson, the former head of Ofsted led the government-appointed taskforce which has produced proposals on reforming 14 to 19 education in England.

Their main plank is a new four-part diploma, subsuming existing GCSEs and A-levels.

Within hours of the final proposals appearing, the prime minister was assuring business leaders that those qualifications were "here to stay".

A government white paper responding to the proposals is due in the new year and is proving not the easiest thing to draft.

Already the likely publication date has slipped from mid-January to February.

There will be some sense of d�j� vu in the department.

When Charles Clarke took over suddenly after Estelle Morris's resignation in the autumn of 2002, a similar major reform announcement - for England's university system - was already overdue.

We've got to make it possible for any child born, where ever that might be in the country... for them to realise their ambitions Ruth Kelly Profile: Ruth Kelly

In his hands it became the white paper that introduced variable tuition fees, repayable from graduate earnings.

Ruth Kelly's own educational background is private schools and Oxford.

There is likely to be considerable interest - not least from private schools, Oxford and other top universities - about her attitude to A-levels and university admissions.

Her predecessor has overseen reforms which included the establishment of the Office for Fair Access.

This is checking whether universities are doing enough to encourage applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds before allowing them to charge higher tuition fees.

An official report on university admissions said more should be done to take account of teenagers' wider potential for university study, alongside their A-level results - although without discriminating against those from independent schools as a group.

'Realise ambitions'

Ms Kelly seems unlikely to take a different line.

She said in a recent BBC interview: "We've got to make it possible for any child born, wherever that might be in the country, in the poorest neighbourhood or in the wealthiest neighbourhood, we've got to make it possible for them to realise their ambitions."

She said investing in public services began to make it possible "for every child to go to a good school, rather than the lucky few to go to a good school."

Ms Kelly's Roman Catholicism has raised questions in some minds about her attitude towards sex education.

The upheaval at her new department will be compounded by the fact that her replacement at the Cabinet Office is the man who has been the school standards minister, David Miliband.

Other issues she will have to deal with include the implementation of the teachers' workload agreement for England and Wales, the growth of specialist schools and city academies, plans for optional extended school hours - and the government's repeated failure to meet its targets for England's test and exam performance.

On her page on the Parliament website, her "special interests" are listed as Economic Policy, European Affairs, Social Policy, Welfare Reform, Employment, Families.

Education is not mentioned.