Welcome back, Prime Minister Truss! Not long ago, you were at the Department for Education advising schools on maths “chunking”. Now you’re in charge of the country. You spent two months serenading Tory members with your love song for grammar schools, but now it’s time to start governing in prose. The sector’s response this week to the idea of lifting the ban on grammars is just a prelude for what’s to come.
For the foreseeable, education policy is likely only to add to your cost-of-living-saturated in-tray. And even throwing money at the problem is unlikely to buy leverage from a sector that’s entirely fed up with the far-from-competent DfE of the past two years.
In the meantime, you’ve cleverly swerved a decision on whether to sort or abort the schools bill left in tatters by your predecessor. But sorting out the chaos of current academy regulation can’t wait too long, especially if your aspiration is still to deliver a fully MAT-led system by 2030.
