This article presents the author's response to Hall and Gunter who accuse the author of trying to mount "a stout defence" of New Labour's reforms of the teaching profession. Hall and Gunter go further and accuse the author of "triumphalism" in his use of the title "Tony Blair's big prize". Their second and more serious challenge concerns the evidence the author used in presenting his analysis. Hall and Gunter accuse him of being highly selective in his evidence, "summarily dismissing socially critical analysis", and elevating other forms of evidence (the increased recruitment, the relatively calm industrial relations, the better public regard) to make the case that, in the government's terms those reforms were largely a success. Like Hall and Gunter, the author is interested in "the bigger picture": the changed relationship between the teaching profession and the state. Like them he sees the importance of the challenges to the public welfare tradition provided by market based models of institutional management, managerialism and performativity. But before the "bigger picture" can be theorised, the author believes that one needs a careful documentation of the reforms that Tony Blair and his successive governments tried, over time, to introduce.