The proposed children’s wellbeing and schools bill would give ministers a new legal power to intervene where academy trusts break rules, while flexi-schooled children would also fall under new council registers.
Government published its full children’s wellbeing and schools bill yesterday.
Headline changes include allowing councils to open schools again, ending the automatic academisation of failing maintained settings and making academies follow reformed national teacher pay scales and condition.
But there are lots of other interesting nuggets that school leaders need to know about.
Schools Week has been through the bill documents to give you a handy round-up of it all!
1. Three branded uniform items maximum
The new law would ban primary schools from requiring more than three branded uniform items.
Secondary and middle schools will also have to follow the same rule, unless one branded item is a tie, in which case they are allowed to require four.
It comes after a poll found more than one in 10 parents reported schools requiring five or more branded items, despite a requirement to minimise their use. A Schools Week investigation in 2018 found one school was even selling branded “drama socks” for £5.
The cap applies over the whole school year, so schools won’t be able to require a different set of three branded items in the summer and the winter.
The cap applies to uniform items required for “general use at school, travelling to or from school, or to participate in any lesson, club, activity or event facilitated by the school during that year”, even if the club or activity is optional.
The schoolwear industry has, unsurprisingly, criticised the cap, which is aimed at reducing costs to parents by allowing them to buy more from generic clothes shops, rather than from specialist suppliers.
Matthew Easter, chair of the Schoolwear Association, claimed there was a “significant risk that the government’s decision will adversely impact pupils and school life in general, by undermining the welfare and attainment benefits that uniform is there to preserve”.
2. Flexi-schooled pupils will need to be on council registers
The bill will create a duty on councils to create and maintain registers of children not in school, and to support children on those registers if councils seek that support.
Children will be eligible if they are not registered at a school, or they are registered but it’s been agreed they can be absent for some or all of the time.
This would include children who are flexi-schooled or who attend alternative provision while remaining on the roll of another school.
Parents of eligible children will be required to inform the local authority that their child is eligible.
A Schools Week investigation last week revealed the rise of flexi-schooling after Ofsted raised concerns about the practice.
3. Beefed up school attendance orders
The bill will also reform the process by which school attendance orders are issued. There will be statutory timeframes for issuing and processing them, and the process for maintained schools and academies will be aligned.
It will become an offence for parents to withdraw children subject to school attendance orders, and those who breach an order can be prosecuted again if they continue to breach it without councils having to begin the process again.
4. Special school parents need council permission for home ed
The government had already announced that the bill would require the parents of children subject to a child protection enquiry or plan to get council consent to home-educate their children.
But the bill and notes state that this will also apply to children at special schools.
“Children in special schools have complex needs and the removal of this school support could in some cases result in safeguarding issues or in a child not receiving a suitable education,” the government said.
Councils will also have to “consider the home environment and other learning environments when determining whether or not children should be required to attend school”.
But parents refused permission will be allowed to appeal to the education secretary.
5. New legal definition of full-time education
The bill sets out for the first time a legal definition of full-time education, which has been a grey area in the past.
A full-time education will now be defined as one where a child “could be expected to receive all or a majority of their education at the institution”.
The draft law will also beef up the education secretary’s powers to deem those running independent schools as not “fit and proper”.
The government will also have the power to temporarily suspend the registration of an independent school if one or more of the school standards are not met, and if they believe that will expose pupils to harm.
6. Ofsted gets power to seize illegal schools evidence
As promised, the bill introduces a “more intrusive inspection regime” for suspected illegal schools.
Inspectors will get the power to enter any premises either with the agreement of the occupier or under a warrant “where they have reasonable cause to believe that an offence is being or has been committed on the premises or that evidence of an offence may be found on the premises”.
The powers will also allow inspectors to “take copies of documents, inspect any equipment, take measurements and take photographs, and make audio and video recordings on the premises”.
At present, they are not allowed to take evidence away from a suspected illegal school.
7. Teacher misconduct agency scope expanded
The draft law also seeks to extend the powers of the Teaching Regulation Agency to cover individuals who commit serious misconduct “when not employed as a teacher, but who have at any time carried out teaching work”.
The bill documents explain the “current interpretation of the legislation only permits the secretary of state to consider misconduct while the person is undertaking teaching work”.
The government is also proposing that bans issued by the TRA are extended to cover teachers working in FE colleges and independent schools.
And they also want to remove a requirement that allegations can only be investigated following a referral from outside the DfE, allowing civil servants to flag potential misconduct.
Expanding the scope of the TRA is controversial. Schools Week investigations have revealed some cases are already taking eight years to concluded because of a Covid backlog and rising numbers of parents making complaints.
8. QTS and national curriculum requirement for academies
The bill will make it a requirement for all new teachers entering the classroom to have or be working towards qualified teacher status and complete a statutory induction period.
This is currently the law for maintained schools, but not for academies.
Academies will also have to follow the national curriculum, but not until after the curriculum and assessment review has concluded and the government has responded.
9. New directions for academy trusts
The government will also get a new power to direct academy trusts to require with legal requirements and “prevent trusts exercising their powers in an unreasonable way”.
At present, academies breach their funding agreements when they fail to meet legal obligations, which may prompt a warning notice.
But the government said “in cases where an academy trust’s non-compliance is minor, termination may not be a proportionate response, especially where the academy in question is not otherwise eligible for intervention”.
The bill would give the government the power to issue a direction ordering trusts to “comply with specific duties or to prevent the unreasonable use of a power”.
This will be done “rather than escalating to termination to provide trusts the opportunity to rectify the situation without threat of termination where this would not be appropriate or proportionate”.
But “where a trust does not comply with the direction the secretary of state may seek to enforce the direction through seeking a mandatory order rather than looking at termination”.
10. No automatic academy orders
As revealed earlier this week, the education secretary will no longer have a duty to issue an academy order to a school “causing concern”, though she will retain it as a power.
The bill notes state there is a “strong track record of strong multi academy trusts turning around failing schools”.
But “since the first academies were introduced, the government have also seen evidence that not all schools’ outcomes improve following academisation”.
11. New council schools
As first revealed by Schools Week, the government is also scrapping the “free school presumption”, which required councils wanting to open a school to first seek an academy.
This will “enable proposals for all types of schools, including local authority proposals for community and community special schools, where they choose to put these forwards”.
12. National pay rules extended to academies (but not for CEOs!)
The bill will extend the statutory teachers’ pay and conditions framework to those working in academies, including headteachers.
In 2023-24, the median salary for a classroom teacher was £44,870 in secondary academies and £44,677 in LA-maintained secondaries. The median salary was the same in primary academies and maintained schools, at £41,333.
However academy pay freedoms have led to much bigger rises for leaders.
Schools Week’s latest CEO pay league tables found 44 now paid more than £200,000 – up 50 per cent in five years. The highest is paid £485,000.
But the bill states that “senior executive leaders appointed by multi-academy trusts or single academy trusts are not within scope, even if they are also the principal or headteacher of an academy school or an alternative provision academy”.
The government also said there “has been positive innovation and good practice” in some academies, and they want “to ensure that local authority-maintained schools also have the opportunity to implement this to strengthen recruitment and retention across the sector”.
13. Legal duty to co-operate on admissions…
There will be new duties on mainstream state schools and councils to co-operate on admissions, and for mainstream, special and alternative provision state schools to co-operate with local authorities on place-planning.
It will mean the education secretary can “intervene to address serious failures to co-operate” and direct a council or school to comply with their duties.
14. …councils get power to direct academy admissions
Councils will also get the power to direct academies to admit a child who has been refused admission or been permanently excluded from every suitable nearby school.
At present, they can only request that the education secretary uses her power to direct academies, which “can create a further delay in getting the child into school”.
There is also no formal route of redress for academies that don’t agree with a direction.
The changes would also enable academies, like maintained schools, to appeal to the Schools Adjudicator where they do not agree with the local authority’s decision to direct its school to admit a child.
15. And councils can object to academies’ capacity, too
With school rolls due to fall in the coming years, the government is also seeking to change the law around objections to school’s published admission number, or PAN.
At the moment, any body or person can object to a PAN being reduced. But the government intends to change the law so councils can object “where the admission number has been increased or maintained at the same level as the previous year”.
This would “give local authorities a route to challenge the PAN which the admission authority has set for the school and help them to meet their sufficiency duty and manage the school estate effectively”.
Schools Week investigations have revealed tensions between councils duty over place planning but a lack of power over academy admission decisions when dealing with fall rolls.
The Schools Adjudicator will also get the power to set the published admissions number for a school when they uphold an objection from a council.
