The AFR Magazine's hotly anticipated annual Power issue includes lists of the key players across five different industry sectors. Here, the top five education influencers.

The landscape in school education was turned upside down in the past year. Federal Minister Simon Birmingham stole Labor's clothes and pushed Gonski school funding – once Labor's signature policy – through Parliament. It was a brazen attempt to neutralise the political advantage Labor has long enjoyed on the school funding issue. But it was also a move that made sense; cutting through the complex and ad hoc legacy of decades of deal-making to introduce a consistent way to distribute education money based on children's and schools' needs.