New Labour Government Introduces Children’s Wellbeing Bill to Enhance School Standards and Fairness
The new Labour Government plans to introduce a Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which will mandate schools to work with local authorities on admissions, SEND inclusion, and place planning.
This announcement was made in the King’s Speech on 17 July. The Government states that the Children’s Wellbeing Bill aims to “remove barriers to opportunity” and “raise school standards” to ensure fairness in the school system for every child.
The Bill’s main points include:
- Ensuring children are safe, happy, and rooted in their communities by strengthening multi-agency child protection and safeguarding arrangements.
- Mandating free breakfast clubs in all primary schools to ensure every child is well-prepared for the school day, regardless of their circumstances.
- Introducing legislation to limit the number of branded uniform and PE kit items that schools can require, reducing costs for parents and removing barriers to accessing school activities.
- Requiring local authorities to maintain Children Not in School registers and support home-educating parents.
- Changing legislation to regulate and inspect independent schools, giving Ofsted more power to investigate unregistered independent schools.
- Enabling serious teacher misconduct to be investigated.
- Requiring all schools to cooperate with local authorities on admissions, SEND inclusion, and place planning.
- Ensuring greater consistency between academies and maintained schools by requiring all schools to teach the national curriculum.
- Recognising the teaching profession by ensuring new teachers have, or are working towards, Qualified Teacher Status (QTS).
- Bringing multi-academy trusts into the inspection system to make it fairer and more transparent.
Multi-academy trusts manage over 45% of state schools. The current inspection system focuses on individual schools, without powers to evaluate the trust’s overall effectiveness. The Government notes significant variation in performance at the trust level.
In conclusion, the new legislation aims to create a fairer and more supportive school system, addressing key issues such as child protection, uniform costs, teacher misconduct, and the performance of multi-academy trusts.
