Gillian Keegan appointed Education Secretary 

Ms Keegan replaces Kit Malthouse, who resigned from the role earlier in the day after his tenure in the Truss administration, which lasted just seven weeks.

She will be the fifth Education Secretary since July, and the tenth since the Conservatives were first elected to office in 2010.

Ms Keegan was elected as MP for Chichester in West Sussex in 2017. She served as a junior minister for apprenticeship and skills between 2020 and 2021, and then as a Minister of State for Care and Mental Health earlier this year. Last month, she became a junior Foreign Office minister, with a responsibility for Africa.

In his inaugural speech, Mr Sunak said he wanted to deliver “better schools”. In the 2019 Conservative manifesto, the party pledged to invest in education, and committed a £30,000 teacher starting salary, backing heads to use exclusions, expanding alternative provision schools, continuing to build more free schools, and investing in arts, music, and sport.

Ms Keegan’s priorities will be tackling school funding issues, a crisis of teacher recruitment, and impending strike action.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, welcomed Ms Keegan to her new role, but described the fact that she was the fifth Education Secretary in four months as “farcical”.

He said: “This revolving door shows a complete disregard for the importance of what should be a key government post, and it must stop.

“Education matters more than this. It is a vital public service.

“Schools and colleges deserve stable political leadership which addresses the crucial issues of inadequate funding and severe staff shortages caused by a government which has undervalued the workforce and sapped its morale.”

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT School Leaders’ Union, said: “With the ‘Halloween Budget’ looming – and further cuts implied by new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – the new education secretary has just days to get to grips with the reality of the situation facing schools, listen to the profession, and make a compelling case to the Treasury for the funding so urgently needed.

“School leaders will be hopeful that in Gillian Keegan we might now finally have an Education Secretary who understands that education should be seen not as a drain on the nation’s finances, but as the best investment that can be made in our country’s future – and who stays the course to the next election to make education a priority for this government again.”