So what will the appointment of Justine Greening as education secretary mean for education?

Firstly, and importantly, she’ll have a bigger department than her predecessor. It looks as if higher education and further education will be moved back under her wing - as they were before Peter Mandelson took over at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and as David Cameron wanted to do in 2010 but couldn’t because Vince Cable resisted. There’s a whole other column to be written on what this means for higher and further education, but in the short term it means more people in the Department for Education, more junior ministers, and more that Justine Greening will need to oversee - including, from next a week, an HE Bill to pilot through Parliament. 

Secondly, the extent of the reshuffle today - combined with statements by the new chancellor and prime minister to the effect that there won’t be an emergency budget but that the fiscal rules set by George Osborne may be eased - means that previous settlements on existing departmental budgets may be up for grabs. We’re unlikely to see a complete reopening of the public finances (an independent UK needs to convince the markets of its solvency more than ever) but Greening, like every new secretary of state, may have a bit more wiggle room to argue for some new projects. 

The ‘Gove reforms’

What about policy from a schools perspective? Greening is relatively fresh to education as an issue, although she’s covered it from a global perspective in the Department for International Development. One thing to watch will be the make-up of her junior ministers. Will Nick Gibb and Sam Gyimah - both holding major policy responsibilities that they are part-way through implementing - stay around?

From a broader perspective, what we can call the “Gove reforms” in education - hatched to a significant extent in thinktank Policy Exchange by people like Nick Boles, Lord James O’Shaughnessy and Sam Freedman among others before being adopted by Gove and his team - have more or less been done. Love them or loathe them, they have run their course in policy terms (which is absolutely not the same thing as being done and dusted in implementation terms, as anyone juggling with new curriculum and assessment at the moment will attest). It is unlikely, both education-wise and policy-wise, that Greening will completely deliver any other set of reforms quite so radical. 

There is, needless to say, a huge amount that needs to happen anyway. School funding - both the total quantum and its distribution. A continued evolution of the role of regional schools commissioners and system oversight. The future of the academies programme. Teacher recruitment and retention. The ongoing challenges of educational cold spots and differences in attainment and progression among the poorest children. The analysis and problems identified in the Education Excellence Everywhere White Paper are still pertinent, even if the document as a whole may quickly fade away. 

One option would therefore be for Greening to handle the existing issues but otherwise batten down the hatches, keep quiet, smile, mollify, and placate. We could perhaps call this the NiMo strategy (or the Jeremy Hunt strategy). But as can be seen from those two examples of previous secretaries of state who also were appointed to execute that mandate, this is unlikely to hold - both because events develop and because any minister, quite reasonably, has a desire to make a mark. 

Following her own path

So at a minimum, expect Greening to have something which is distinctively her own. Character was NiMo’s. Maybe girls’ education will move to become a DfE priority, or maybe it will be something new. 

But the biggest opportunity for Greening, and for DfE, lies in considering what the education elements of the wider Theresa May philosophy of government could look like. Even at this very early stage, there are some clear indications - a greater focus on the moral certainty of government, a pushback against some of the excesses of free market, and a reiteration of the one nation agenda. The new prime minister, and her new Cabinet, will also be acutely aware of the wider lessons of the Brexit vote - a sense that for too many people in this country, the existing political, economic and social order doesn’t work for them.

If one were to speculate as to what this might mean for a wider education agenda, we might see a move towards greater central management of teacher supply and possibly even placement - as already happens in the NHS. We will almost certainly not see any profit-making. There may be (certainly in a new, expanded department) a greater focus on technical and vocational education, building on the Sainsbury review, which has just been published. There may be a greater focus on the highly able, potentially through a shift in position on grammars, but almost certainly including a new push on what used to be known as gifted and talented programmes. 

Schools should welcome their summer break this year. From September, things may be about to get busy again. 

Jonathan Simons is a former head of education in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, and writes the Whispers from Westminster column in TES magazine. He tweets as @PXEducation

Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow TES on Twitter and like TES on Facebook