The biggest jamboree on the annual thinktank circuit, the Prospect Thinktank Awards, hit town again last month. Wonks old and new gathered to hear the judgements of a panel comprising, among others, a former adviser to Kofi Annan, Prospect editor Bronwen Maddox, and former righthandwoman to Gordon Brown, Shriti Vadera. Not a panel inclined to mince their words, nor to be buffeted by prevailing winds, unlike this year’s Man Booker prize panel, whose members were pilloried for favouring literariness over ‘readability’ before eventually settling on the most establishment figure left in the race.

Establishment figures did not fare badly with Prospect this year either but the foreign affairs tankworld was brought down a notch or two by the judges for thinking firmly inside the box while the world transformed around it. The Royal United Services Institute won praise for engaging with the Chinese Communist party while Chatham House was singled out for sterling work on Yemen, but the panel lamented the foreign affairs tanks’ lack of responsiveness while the Arab Spring raged, and noted that most of their output seemed to simply ‘amount to an exhortation to either the US or NATO to “do something”.’

Thinktank of the year went to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research for its robust analysis, largely Ballsite in content, of the economic crisis. One anonymous judge apparently remarked that it had been ‘doing Ed Balls’ job a bit better than Ed Balls’. Quite whether the NIESR yet has the same name recognition as the shadow chancellor, or has been making the case against overhasty cuts since mid-2010, was not noted.

Others receiving honorable mentions included the IPPR, recently rebranded in capital letters, for ‘looking newly frisky’ despite having been around a good while. Also singled out for recognition was 2020health for a paper on telehealth. 2020health, in fact, sits several floors below Progress in our gaff on Victoria Street, SW1. Mention of its name reminds your correspondent of the day this summer that a riotous moblet drenched the building’s lobby in fake blood to protest against the tank’s apparent endorsement of NHS privatisation. Less controversially, perhaps, Reform seized Prospect’s publication of the year award for its report Every Teacher Matters.

Reform was also under the microscope recently as George Monbiot investigated the transparency of thinktanks’ funding. He concluded: ‘The “free market thinktanks” and their secret funders are a threat to democracy.’ Despite occupying that end of the spectrum, Reform got four out of five from this one-man panel, while on the leftwing side Compass won full marks for disclosing donors in its annual report.

Compass’ new report, Education for the Good Society, covers a lot of ground. But its views on free schools have drawn particular attention in the wake of new shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg promising that an incoming Labour government’s first priority would not be to close down schools. It recognises that, ‘in a world of academies, free schools and state schools, school sixth forms, colleges and the workplace, we have to find the glue’ and that councils wishing to retain control over admissions will have to remake the moral case for doing so. Not a ringing endorsement of free schools but it is hard to really be gung-ho about them with the clumsy, disruptive effect they could have. Still, the left is getting used to the idea that being seen to resist parental freedom is no surefire route to success. In any case, we can look over the North Sea where for decades parents in the Netherlands have been happily setting up free schools where they think there is a need. This has hardly made for an inegalitarian society, and plenty of Labour people both there, and now here, are behind free schools. If the party can square this circle, there is an award in the offing, with yours truly comprising the panel. Answers on the back of a postcard (address above. No blood on the carpet, please).