Claire Coutinho, the MP for East Surrey, has been appointed as a minister at the Department for Education.
She was appointed as minister for disabled people just last month, and became an MP in 2019.
She will join the department as a junior minister. Coutinho worked at investment bank Merrill Lynch and was education lead at accounting firm KPMG before being elected to parliament. She’s also served as a special adviser at the Treasury.
She said she was “delighted … to be joining Gillian Keegan and team ‘at the closest thing we have to a silver bullet’”.
She will also join Nick Gibb, who Schools Week understands will be named schools minister, and Robert Halfon, who is set to be named skills minister.
Coutinho likely to replace Kelly Tolhurst
That means Coutinho is likely to replace Kelly Tolhurst, who was schools and children’s minister.
Tolhurst tweeted that it had ”been a privilege to serve as minister for schools & childhood”.
“I have decided that now more than ever, with the challenges we face I want to focus on supporting & helping the people of Rochester & Strood, representing my constituents & businesses from the backbenches.”
Coutinho was privately educated at James Allen’s Girls’ School, in Dulwich. She studied maths and philosophy at Oxford.
During her time at KPMG from January 2017 to July 2018 she led the firm’s sponsorship of the City Academy, in Hackney.
She was also co-chair of the Fair Education Alliance working group on numeracy.
Alongside Keegan, she also sits on the advisory board for Onward, a “mainstream conservatism” think tank that aims to boost economic opportunities.
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