It was always something of a surprise that Labour didn’t make more of the twin crises in teacher recruitment and pupil places before the election. Both are very real problems being faced by schools and the consequences will soon be seen by students and their voting parents.

We woke up to two big headlines in the Labour-sympathising Observer and Sunday Mirror proclaiming that a “new analysis” had found that a record number of teachers had left teaching in the last recorded year.

We should set to one side that what is on offer is neither new, nor analysis, coming at it does straight out of a statistical report published in July, but it is interesting that Powell and her team see this as an attack line.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the government is vulnerable on this subject, and it won’t go down well with voters when their children start coming home from a school where they’ve been taught physics by a biology teacher in a class of 35. 

As the initial teacher training figures released earlier this month by admissions body UCAS showed, things aren’t about to get any better. Expect Labour to keep banging on about this in the weeks, months and years ahead.

And it will make it even easier for Powell and her gang if Conservative ministers continue to refuse to accept that there’s a crisis in teacher supply at all.

Not that it will make a lot of difference to heads struggling to fill their staffrooms.