The fact is that listening to people who are relaxing after a tough day at work can sometime enable some truths to emerge that would otherwise be communicated in a more formal and cautious manner. According to the biographical information on the Government website for the Right Honourable Damian Hinds ‘Damian spent 18 years working in the pubs, brewing and hotel industries, in Britain and abroad.’ That said he obtained a first class honours degree from Trinity College Oxford and was President of the Oxford Union and he is now Secretary of State for Education so possibly he spent very little time behind any bars in any pubs. One imagines if he was still working behind a bar now, some of the truths emerging from teachers having a chat after school would provide Damian with information that otherwise he can gain from reading these comments by Natalie Perera, who was head of school funding reform at the Department for Education from 2011 to 2014, is now executive director and head of research at the Education Policy Institute. According to Natalie “What we do know is that there are a large number of schools out there who tell us they are buckling under the funding pressure, and I do not understand why government is not listening to them. The narrative is that we trust teachers, we trust leaders, we want them to be autonomous, we want to devolve power to schools, but yet on funding when they tell us that they are falling down, government’s saying, ‘Oh you’ve got more money than ever, deal with it.’”

Natalie believes that the DfE simply can’t publicly acknowledge the problem. It seems that relatively new in post Damian is faced with two choices. He pays attention to the calls from Schools to argue for meaningful levels of funding and chooses to make reform of school funding a matter that shapes his political career, or he ignores the calls and hopes that by the time the crisis has really exploded, that he has moved onto another job. He was Assistant Chief Whip for 8 months, in the Treasury for 14 months and Minister of State in the DWP for 18 months. That means he is unlikely to have moved on from DfE before  Jan 2020 so it is hard to see him succeeding unless he is prepared to put a line in the sand.