All is not well at the top of the Department for Education. It will come as a surprise to no one with even a passing interest in schools policy that stress levels are through the roof among ministers and their advisers. There has been quite a lot of shouting, apparently.

Rumours persist about whether Nicky Morgan might be shuffled out of the department in the coming months, with some even speculating that she could be replaced by the Brexiteering blond bombshell himself as part of a post-referendum settlement.

So it’s not hard to see why tensions are running high. The last few weeks have been rough in the DfE. It was a Sats season unlike any other, with not one but TWO papers leaked. Then there were the U-turns on the baseline tests and universal mandatory academisation.

That’s not to mention the schools minister Nick Gibb’s little problem with his own Spag questions, and just about the entire primary teaching population in uproar about last week’s reading comprehension test.

And then there are the perpetual crises of staffroom workload, exam reform and teacher recruitment that ministers don’t seem any nearer to fixing.

It’s one thing being criticised by your political and union enemies on philosophical grounds - it’s quite another to have your competency called into question.

‘Managerial nightmare’

One veteran watcher of the Whitehall Bubble cruelly sums it up thus: “They’ve somehow contrived to make running the DfE look like the managerial nightmare of the Home Office combined with the industrial relations of the Department of Health.”

This presumably proves especially embarrassing when - as Ms Morgan was - you were appointed to run the department as a “safe pair of hands”: to tidy up and pacify in the aftermath of Michael Gove’s blitzkrieg on the schools system.

All of which makes sense of Ms Morgan’s offer of an olive branch to the unions this week.

There is, apparently, now a concerted effort underway from within the DfE to put the recent crises behind them and move on. The next couple of years are going to be about policy implementation rather than innovation. The message appears to be: “Let’s calm this down, people. Let’s try to make it work.”

All of which might come as something of a relief to the teaching profession. But as we’ve seen these past few weeks, it will be much, much easier said than done.

Ed Dorrell is head of content at TES. He tweets as @ed_dorrell

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