It is highly likely we will have (another) new secretary of state for education in the next 18 months - and probably from a different political party, too.

Many teachers will be hoping a change of leadership spells the end of political meddling in education, but that’s unlikely. There are deep fault lines running below schools’ foundations that no government can ignore, particularly in relation to assessment, curriculum and mental health and wellbeing.

So, how might they balance the tensions that too often pull the sector in different directions?

That’s the subject of a new report I published last week with the Institute for Public Policy, alongside the Centre for Education and Youth, which focused on three key areas.

1. To examine or not to examine?

National assessment in England is heavily dominated by exams. But it hasn’t always been that way. In the early 1990s, some GCSEs lacked any external assessment whatsoever, and there were constant calls for more “relevant” and “authentic” assessments.

The problem is that “authenticity” comes at the cost of reliability. Although people often assume socioeconomically disadvantaged and ethnic-minority pupils particularly struggle with exams, numerous studies show it is non-examined assessments that stack the odds against these groups.

That trend was borne out when centre-assessed grades replaced exams during the pandemic.

Alternatives to exams, like coursework, are also unpopular: most teachers are opposed to increased use of coursework and, as one pupil put it in a recent academic study: “I want to be judged by what I do and not what the teachers think I can do.”

The evidence on exams’ effect on pupils’ wellbeing is also mixed, with one study even finding an increase in pupils’ school enjoyment prior to sitting exams.

Nonetheless, with the average key stage 4 student spending over 30 hours in the exam hall in Year 11, the next education secretary should be open to opportunities to enhance the assessment mix where this can be done without jeopardising students’ chances of getting the grade they deserve.

The Extended Project Qualification is one example of how this can be done. It is one of the most popular qualifications at KS5 and is highly valued. The International Baccalaureate includes similar elements.

Access to qualifications like these could be widened out at different key stages, although they should not be included in high-stakes accountability as they are not taken in controlled conditions.

The advent of comparative judgement technology also means that assessments can now reliably include less structured tasks than they have done in the past.

Instead of abandoning exams, the next education secretary should release the pressure valve on schools. Teachers would then feel freer to use their professional judgment to do what’s right for their pupils.

Shifting away from single-year measures of school performance and replacing them with rolling three-year averages would be one way of doing that.

Sats could also be reformed so that they assess a whole year group’s performance rather than individual pupils. If this happens, gaps will need to be monitored to ensure equity does not suffer.

Changes like these could tackle some of the more toxic features of accountability and ensure the influence of exams is softened.

2. What should schools teach and who should decide?

The world moves on and, 10 years after the last curriculum review, it’s time for a refresh. Unfortunately, there is too much to learn and not enough life - let alone time in school - in which to learn it.

Curriculum policy, therefore, involves difficult choices about prioritisation. Most people want pupils to access an expansive and diverse range of content, but learning takes practice and an overloaded curriculum is leaving little space to apply what they have learned in unfamiliar, less structured scenarios.

The more that goes into the next curriculum, the fewer opportunities for teachers to follow up exciting and unexpected avenues, and the less time there will be for pupils to develop critical mastery.

A Labour education secretary should therefore task subject experts with making difficult but necessary decisions about content and sequencing.

These experts’ job would be to pick powerful but diverse content, while reducing curriculum load and giving teachers space to “take down the scaffolding” so pupils can independently apply their learning. That will not be an easy task.

Once implemented, a revised curriculum should be an entitlement for all pupils, regardless of whether they are in a multi-academy trust or maintained school.

On one hand, this might seem to reduce flexibility, making it harder to tailor teaching to local context and pupils’ interests. However, even if the curriculum specifies key content, schools can still apply it to their local context.

For example, a geography curriculum might state the types of water courses pupils should study, but a school can still use local examples to bring that to life.

Moreover, as Mark Enser has argued in Tes, too much tailoring isn’t necessarily a good thing. It can entrench pupils in their current circumstances, whereas the purpose of the national curriculum should be to take pupils outside of their everyday experiences.

Finally, some people will see a curriculum review as a chance to move away from traditional subjects. The business lobby has long argued that cross-cutting competencies and personal attributes are more important than disciplinary subjects - a movement that was already being labelled “progressive vocationalism” back in the early 1990s.

But a new education secretary should resist the pressure to conflate the end goal of education (what qualities we want young people to develop) with the means (what you teach).

In other words, wanting young people to be compassionate does not mean that you should “teach compassion”. It might be that the same goal can be achieved by studying a range of literature or historical periods.

3. Improving pupils’ mental health and wellbeing

Our society needs to improve the experience of childhood.

Youth wellbeing and mental health have declined around the world but the situation in England is worse. The tricky thing is that schools have limited influence in the area.

One study of 23,000 English primary pupils found that school only accounted for around 4 per cent of variation in mental health outcomes, and another found that school only accounted for 1.4 per cent of variation in wellbeing among 11- to 14-year-olds.

Clearly, then, schools are not a panacea for youth mental health and wellbeing crisis - but they can still play a role in a society-wide response.

Three things would help schools play their part. Firstly, even if teachers can’t magic away this crisis, they cannot avoid having to respond to spiralling needs. This is challenging work in an area beset by conflicting and incomplete evidence.

A new education secretary should ensure teachers are equipped with the information and skills they need to do so. Alongside this, funding and capacity are needed to clear bottlenecks in Camhs, otherwise, schools can do little else but firefight.

Secondly, policies on wellbeing and mental health in school often focus too much on “thoughts and feelings”. This is just one dimension of wellbeing, known as “subjective wellbeing”.

Another dimension is “personal wellbeing”, involving personal development, a sense of purpose, and setting and achieving goals. Schools are ideally placed to contribute to these things.

Initiatives like school-based mental health support teams have begun to expand access to specialist services, making the most of schools’ near-universal reach.

The third thing a new education secretary should do is to build on these approaches. Schools could become hubs for support, without teachers being expected to do the work themselves.

These hubs should work to strengthen family and community relationships, improve the material conditions in which pupils grow up, and provide access to fulfilling enrichment activities - since these are the things children and young people need in order to thrive.

When Michael Gove moved into the Department for Education after 13 years of Labour rule, part of what made him such a controversial - but formidable - secretary of state was his enthusiasm for taking strong positions on education’s big questions.

If 2024 heralds another change of government, a new education secretary should attempt a rather more nuanced balancing act.

Loic Menzies is a visiting fellow at Sheffield Institute of Education and senior research associate at Jesus College Intellectual Forum