On we go to the sixth team of education ministers we’ve had in the last 14 months.

Even by Whitehall standards it’s farcical and, frankly, enraging given the amount of pressure school leaders and teachers are under at the moment.

At least this time the changes are for the better.

A welcome reshuffle for once

One of the benefits of Liz Truss’s woeful premiership being cut short is that her insultingly poor education team has been sent to the backbenches.

Jonathan Gullis and Andrea Jenkyns should never have been near ministerial office, as their inflammatory comments on migration last week showed.

There was zero chance that anything sensible would happen with them in post, and their appointments were a strong sign that Truss had little interest in education and wasn’t going to give it any priority.

Rishi Sunak has taken a very different approach. The new secretary of state Gillian Keegan is a close ally of his who has the perfect backstory, having done an apprenticeship herself, to focus on his main interest of post-16 skills and employability.

She’s already spent time as junior minister for the skills brief and Robert Halfon, who has championed skills-focused education for years, is back as skills minister to support her. Nick Gibb has been reappointed for a third stint to offer experience on the schools side.

Meanwhile, Claire Coutinho, the new children’s minister, was a special adviser to Sunak at the Treasury, and will, I suspect, have been tasked with managing the complex challenges of the SEND Green Paper, the review of children’s social care, and the mess that is early years policy, at a time when Labour is pushing hard on that issue.

So this is a more serious team and one with much better connections to No 10.

Two big problems 

They only have two problems: no money and no time.

At the moment the Treasury and the Department for Education are in a standard spending review type argument about potential further cuts to budgets as part of the “fiscal event” on 17 November.

But unlike a spending review, it’s all happened in a few weeks, with the entire ministerial team changing in the middle, which is very much to the DfE’s detriment.

I understand that chancellor Jeremy Hunt initially asked for 10 per cent cuts across the whole budget, which would be hugely damaging, coming on top of stealth cuts due to inflation. Even school spending hasn’t been protected.

It’s simply impossible to deliver any serious policy reform when institutions - from nurseries to universities - are struggling to keep their head above water.

We’re already looking at waves of redundancies across the education sector next year even without further cuts. It doesn’t really matter how serious or well-meaning ministers are if all they can do is worry about how best to manage decline.

Time is the other constraint on the new team. We are now within two years of the next election - the most likely date is October 2024. It’s unclear if the Schools Bill launched over the summer is completely dead, after Truss decided not to go ahead with it, or just on life support. But either way, it will, at best, tidy up academies regulation.

Economic reality cannot be ignored

There is likely to be only one more session of Parliament in which to launch any new legislation, giving ministers just a few months to develop proposals, if they want to. It’s hard to see much substance being put forward.

There have been a few headlines suggesting Sunak wants education to be his positive story in a period that will otherwise be marked by austerity and recession.

One of his closest friends, The Spectator political editor James Forsyth, wrote in The Times that education could be Sunak’s “big revolution” without giving much of an indication of how.

Others have argued the prime minister might bring back some of his policy ideas from the summer leadership campaign like the “British baccalaureate”, an A level replacement that would require all students to do maths and English plus developing other pseudo-skills like “creativity”.

Apart from the fact that it couldn’t be called that - education is devolved and there’s already a Welsh baccalaureate - there isn’t nearly enough time to develop, legislate for, and launch a new qualification. Even if it was a good idea.

If there are other “revolutionary” ideas floating around, we have yet to hear them.  

The sad reality is the next few years are going to be bleak across the public sector with significant funding pressures, strikes and the impact of growing poverty making everyone’s life harder.

Ministers can try to sugar-coat the pill but it’s going to be horribly bitter either way.

Sam Freedman is a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education and a senior fellow at the Institute of Government