Debate on the government’s Green Paper has focused on its most contentious proposals for selective, faith and private schools. There’s been little attention paid to a technical discussion at the beginning that gives us a big clue about the new administration’s priorities.

In this section, the government argues that its predecessors’ use of free school meals (FSM) as the main proxy for “poor” has led to a distorted focus on the 14 per cent of eligible pupils rather than the wider pool of children who are not in desperate poverty but whose families are “just managing”. In the Green Paper consultation, it asks for proposals as to how these families can be identified to ensure that educational policies are benefitting them, too.

It’s easy to understand why Theresa May and her advisers are keen to help this group.

A recent report from the Resolution Foundation defined “just managing” as the 6 million households between the 10 per cent poorest and the 50 per cent wealthiest. Five-in-six of these families have at least one adult in full-time work, but 80 per cent of them earn less than £21,000. For the younger “just managing” families, the dream of owning a home is more distant than at any point for decades.

There’s a political incentive as well. The richest 50 per cent lean Tory, and seem unlikely to convert to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour any time soon. The poorest 10 per cent tend to live in the safest Labour seats.

It’s the “just managing”, or “squeezed middle” as Ed Miliband called them when trying to appeal to the same group, who dominate the marginals, particularly in the Midlands and Yorkshire.

Helping hand

But what, in practical terms, can be done to help these families? The benefit of targeting the very poorest is that it’s a small enough group for a realistic amount of money to make a difference.

The “just managing” are too numerous for similar financial targeting to work (the same goes for tax breaks or tax credit increases - the amount needed to offer meaningful benefit is huge).

Indeed, there’s a risk that spreading existing money around more would threaten the big improvements in the schools that serve the poorest.

More grammar schools certainly aren’t the answer. The new selective schools proposed in the Green Paper would make things worse for these families. Any quotas for poorer pupils would have to be based on FSM, as there are no alternative measures of wealth available. The working poor would be largely excluded.

Given how many families are “just managing”, the only policies that will make a significant difference to their children’s education are those that will improve the quality of all schools without worrying about targeting or selection.

Ensuring a high-quality curriculum; an assessment and accountability system that works; keeping the best teachers in the schools that need them; and making school leadership more inviting. None of these things are quick fixes or easily distilled into a soundbite.

But, in the end, it’s the daily grind of improving these core components of a great education system that will give the children of the “just managing” the opportunities that are still, too often, reserved for the rich.

Sam Freedman is executive director of programmes at Teach First and a former government policy adviser