In my household, as I’m sure is the case in many, emptying the kitchen bin has become something of a psychological game of chicken.

You see, it’s better for all of us if the bin is emptied in a timely manner. And yet, especially at this time of year, no one wants to be the one that actually does the emptying, with the associated dangers of messy leakage or exposure to the cold, wet outside world.

And so we surreptitiously push down the existing rubbish to create a little more space (each push only heightening the risks of a catastrophic bag failure) in the hope that someone else will be forced to grasp the nettle and do the right thing.

The education secretary, Justine Greening, to her credit, has just taken out two big bags of rubbish.

The first is compulsory sex education.

I remember, as a civil servant during the House of Lords committee stage of the 2006 Education and Inspections Act, fiercely resisting a Lib Dem amendment to add PSHE (as it was then known) to the national curriculum.

Nobody thought that the amendment was the wrong thing to do, but equally no minister wanted to be the one that had to propose said statutory curriculum. They knew that it would, almost certainly, offend both liberal campaigners (who would want more sex education) and conservative and religious opponents (who would want less).

The second is the schools national funding formula.

The growing centralisation of education policy and the remarkable rise of academies has long meant that the old method of confusing, and often historic, local authority allocations has been seriously in need of an overhaul.

Schools that are a few hundred yards apart can see huge disparities in their per-pupil calculations; disparities that have no objective justification, but are purely the product of arbitrary local authority boundaries and the successive whims of elected councillors and schools’ forums.

The problem, again, was that no one was ever going to be happy with the new formula. For those schools that had been historically underfunded, the proposals wouldn’t go far enough and they would, therefore, be unlikely to shout their heartfelt appreciation from their newly refurbished rooftops and/or laptops.

On the other hand, those that lost out would certainly complain bitterly about the devastating impact of their losses.

‘The big bin bag of educational policy’

Rather than tackling these issues, ministers of both parties have simply deferred them, pushing them firmly down in the big bin bag of educational policy to create a little more space for the sort of shiny new ideas that politicians prefer - and leaving the work of clearing up to an unfortunate successor.

That successor has arrived.

It takes a great deal of political courage to take on the difficult and necessary work that is required to improve the system.

It takes even more to do so at a time when schools are facing real-terms budget cuts and reeling from the impact of a series of wide-ranging reforms to structures, curriculum and accountability, all of which were introduced with little thought for their implementation and the cumulative effect that they would have on teacher workload, recruitment and retention.

But it has to be done. As my wife says: “There is no bin fairy.”

So I fully salute Ms Greening’s courage in taking these two brave steps, while at the same time - and without a hint of irony - reserving the right to:

a) Complain bitterly about the vicious and unwarranted cuts that we are facing in Birmingham because of her deeply unfair national funding formula;

b) Bemoan the unseemly puritanical/permissive [delete as appropriate] nature of her version of compulsory sex education.

Heath Monk is the executive director of the Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham