Theresa May has made it clear she wants social mobility to be a defining theme of her time in office. How it is to be achieved is less obvious. Her original plan hinged on a return to widespread selection in secondary education, but not everyone in her party was convinced – and rightly not, since the evidence shows grammar schools exacerbating social segregation. Thankfully, last June’s election left no Commons majority for rolling them out. So there is a gap in Mrs May’s programme where a flagship education policy used to be. This puts pressure on Damian Hinds, the new education secretary. His first public statement of intent, a speech earlier this week, avoided controversy, which isn’t to say it was uninteresting. Mr Hinds addressed the challenge that rapid technological change poses to schools and the need to create systems so adults can acquire new skills.

These are not original insights, but they are a refreshing break from years of fixation on school management structures. The same is true of Mr Hinds’ focus on what he calls “employability skills” – the social and cognitive capabilities that make school leavers attractive candidates for jobs but do not appear on the academic curriculum. These can be as elementary as a readiness to look a boss in the eye, reliably turning up each morning, responding to criticism constructively, and speaking clearly and politely. Such things can be learned, but not as superficial performance. They are expressions of confidence, resilience and that ill-defined thing known as “character”. Such attributes are hard currency in a competitive jobs market.

Mr Hinds is not the first minister to extol the virtues of resilience – the ability to defer gratification and to recover from setbacks. Nicky Morgan, one of his predecessors, has written a book about teaching students such traits. But it is encouraging that Mr Hinds sees it as a priority. It sounds like a second-order issue only to someone who has not tried to teach or work in environments where such qualities are lacking. The education secretary’s interest in such matters also predates his acquisition of cabinet rank. As a former chair of a cross-party parliamentary working group on social mobility, he has been thinking about these issues since before Mrs May took them up as part of her signature mission.

That doesn’t mean he will have the authority or skill to develop the right policies – let alone the resources. A lesson from the grammar schools crusade is that the PM can be stubbornly impervious to evidence. Meanwhile, austerity is hobbling every department, and education is no exception. When cuts are eating into core curriculum functions and teachers are demoralised, the addition of “employability skills” to the mix can sound like an ambition for less crisis-prone times. It will certainly take character and resilience to translate Mr Hinds’ lofty words into practical, evidence-led policy. Time will tell if he is endowed with the qualities he wants to inculcate in younger generations.