Newington's Victoria Morgan looks at what the Queen's Speech means for the education sector.

The education sector has been bombarded with reforms in recent years and the 2017 Queen’s Speech has, for the time being, dramatically slowed the pace of change. For many in the sector, the lack of new announcements will have been welcome. Theresa May’s previous focus on grammar schools – at a time when school funding, teacher workload and recruitment, and curriculum changes have caused increasing concern – appeared misguided at best and reckless at worst. As such, many will have been relieved that proposals to end the ban on creating new grammar schools were quietly dropped following May’s loss of a Commons’ majority.

With no education bill in the foreseeable future, the Government has pledged instead to continue with existing plans to reform the national schools funding formula and to implement T-Levels following last year’s publication of the Post-16 Skills Plan. A widely-welcomed green paper on children and young people’s mental health will also be published. However, for education, the Queen’s Speech was more about what it didn’t say than what it did. Proposals to scrap free primary school lunches did not appear, which again reflected the Conservative Party’s need to eradicate the most controversial aspects of its manifesto. Elsewhere, there were other pledges that did not appear that may yet go ahead, including the establishment of specialist maths schools, removing the admissions cap on new faith schools and ensuring at least 100 leading independent schools become involved in sponsoring academies or founding free schools.

While education has taken a back seat in this Queen’s Speech – not least because of Brexit and the lack of a Conservative majority to ease through legislation – there is an opportunity for the sector to lobby the Government and seek clarity on existing concerns.

Funding and teacher recruitment are major issues and perversely, the Conservatives’ proposal to scrap free primary school meals was meant to save around £650 million and form most of the additional £1 billion a year pledged to boost school budgets. Despite the axing of the most controversial Conservative manifesto pledges, Education Secretary Justine Greening will still have her work cut out to placate an increasingly belligerent sector that has felt for some time that it has been asked to do increasingly more with increasingly less.

Given the large number of manifesto commitments missing from the Queen’s Speech, we can expect sector leaders and opposition parties to exert pressure on the Government in the coming weeks, to not only clarify its position in these areas but to provide much-needed solutions to education funding.