The education sector may be busy dancing on what seemed to be the twitching corpse of pre-election May-ist education policy, but, for some, the jig may be a little premature.

While plans to allow schools across the country to select at age 11 are certainly dead - a result of being way too controversial for a finely balanced House of Commons - there are other facets from the Schools That Work For Everyone Green Paper that remain in play.

Sources tell me that No 10 remains extremely keen on encouraging (forcing?) the independent school sector and universities to get involved with the running of state schools.

The fact that just about no one - least of all the big public schools and HE institutions themselves - thought this was a good idea doesn’t seem enough to dissuade May’s people from pursuing this line of thinking, it would seem.

This is likely to go down extremely badly with the both the independent and the university sectors - in particular, the Independent Schools Council fought a very hard lobbying campaign before the election - and, of course, the state sector will not unreasonably ask what they have to learn from those who teach in the dreaming spires.

All of which begs the question: how can No 10 force this to happen, given their parliamentary weakness? A Green Paper seems unlikely, but has been floated - while another source has suggested the different paries could be “incentivised”. Yet another suggestion is that they could be encouraged to get further involved with free schools.

While they may be tempted to tell the government where to go, both the independent and HE sectors must be aware that if they refuse to collaborate, they could yet be punished by a future Conservative government with a proper majority. Politicians bear a grudge.

Only one thing seems completely clear: the prime minister is keen to deliver on at least part of her manifesto commitment.