A reflection on The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: What’s next for education law and policy?

As another busy academic year winds down for the summer holidays, we take a moment to reflect and look ahead to key legal developments expected in the education sector this autumn.

When the new school year begins, we can expect a white paper setting out the government’s approach to SEND reform, the final report from the curriculum and assessment review, changes to Ofsted’s inspection framework and the likely Royal Assent of the Employment Rights Bill and the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

The government describes the Children’s Wellbeing and School’s Bill (introduced in late 2024), as an attempt to “break the link between young people’s background and their future success”.

Key Provisions of the Bill

Part 1 focuses on reforming the children’s social care system.

Part 2 proposes a series of reforms relating to schooling, including:

• Aligning academies and maintained schools on curriculum and teacher pay.
• Ending the presumption that new schools must be academies, and the requirement for the Secretary of State to issue directive academy orders for maintained schools judged to be in special measures or requiring significant improvement.
• Extending local authorities’ power to direct pupil admission to academies, even when full. Currently, that power of direction only applies to maintained schools.
• Requiring local authorities to maintain a register of compulsory school-age children who are home-educated, with parents required to seek consent before home-educating.
• Mandating daily breakfast clubs in all maintained schools and academies.
• Limiting the number of mandatory branded school uniform items to three.
• Allowing Professional Conduct Panels convened by the Teaching Regulation Agency to consider non-criminal conduct from before an individual entered the teaching profession, if the conduct is serious enough to warrant potential prohibition from teaching.

Amendments in the House of Lords

At the time of Parliamentary recess, the Bill had reached the committee stage in the House of Lords, where it faced around 500 proposed amendments. While most of them are unlikely to pass without government support, the amendments provide an insight into the key concerns about the Bill.

The Bill sees a reversal of the drive toward academisation, and a rowing back of academy freedoms. Some amendments have been tabled to provide, for example, that academies rated by Ofsted as “good” should be exempt from the new requirement to teach the National Curriculum, and that maintained schools should (like academies) be required to publish audited accounts. Others consider that university technical colleges (a type of academy that prepares students aged 14-19 for careers in specific technical fields, partnering with employers with universities) should continue to be exempt from teaching the National Curriculum.  

Other amendments reflect concerns about the Bill’s apparent clampdown on home education. Lord Wei, for example, has suggested that local authorities must consider parental concerns about the harmful impacts school is having on their child, and only withhold consent to home education if they can show that the harm of withdrawal would be greater.

Elsewhere, peers have pushed for the Bill to go further, tabling amendments for example to:

• Create a statutory right for children to have access to nature, as advocated by Wildlife and Countryside Link in a March 2024 policy paper, which argued that it was essential to both pupil wellbeing and societal efforts to combat climate breakdown, by instilling “a sense of knowledge, agency, and environmental guardianship in every child”.
• Exempt families who are seeking asylum from complying with additional home education requirements, while awaiting immigration decisions.
• Extend the Bill’s profit cap for private social care providers to include independent special schools.
• Require schools to ban mobile phones during the day and publish guidance on the safe use of screens and technology in early years settings.

While many of these tabled amendments are unlikely to pass, they offer insight into the issues that legislators are grappling with, where there may be gaps, and where the new frontiers of education policy will lie in the coming years.

We’ll be watching closely to see which amendments are adopted when Parliament returns in September.

If you or your organisation requires support for any of the topics discussed in this blog, please contact Jean Tsang or Helen Fry.

The material in this article is provided for guidance and general information only and is not intended to constitute legal or other professional advice upon which you should rely. In particular, the information should not be used as a substitute for a full and proper consultation with a suitably qualified professional. Please do contact the Bates Wells team if you require further information.