What will the new Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill mean for our education system?

The bill focuses on two key areas, with the first half concentrating on social care and the second half outlining education reforms. Sam Lomas, the Head of Advocacy at Safe Families and Home for Good, a member of the Evangelical Alliance, has written an article about the impact this bill will have on children in care. Therefore, this article will focus on what this bill will mean for schools in England and the education system. 

The proposed education policies have provoked a considerable reaction within the media and particularly the opposition. The bill is currently in committee stage in the House of Commons. This article will help you navigate the content of the bill and the reasons it has caught the attention of so many. 

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• The bill specifies that all primary schools will have to offer free breakfast clubs every day, to all children. 

• Amendments to school uniform policies to ease the financial burden of uniforms. Primary schools will be able to ask for pupils to have up to three branded items and secondary schools may request up to four. 

• All schools, including academies, will be required to employ only teachers with their Qualified Teaching Status (QTS).

• The government plan to extend the statutory school teacher pay and conditions framework to include teachers in academy schools. 

• There will be a requirement for local authority consent before withdrawing certain children from school. Please see Alicia Edmund’s article on home education and out-of-school providers and how these proposals impact parents and Christian charities working with children and young people. 

• There will also be compulsory registers of children not in school in each local authority in England. 

Significantly, the bill has also proposed changes to academies in order to bring consistency around all state schools to ensure that all children are receiving the same quality of education. These amendments have caught the eye of the media and brought about significant debate at Prime Minister’s Questions and during committee debate. 

Academy schools were brought in by the previous Labour government in the 2000s. They were introduced to replace secondary schools that were considered ​‘failing’ by Ofsted. These schools were sponsored by businesses, individuals, churches or other voluntary bodies and not run by local authorities (as traditional state schools are). 

The following Conservative-led coalition government that was elected in 2010 supported the introduction of academies and furthered their growth as they expanded the academy and free school policy. This included legislation that allowed for the transformation of existing schools into academies. In the academic year 2023/24, 43.5% of all schools in England were academies. 

Academies have been able to bring in their own curriculum and structure. This has enabled such schools to cater their teaching to the pupils in their schools and for the leadership to steer the specific direction they want their schools to take. However, Labour now wants to reverse the steps that have been taken over the last twenty years to both introduce academies and strengthen them under both party governments as they seek to unify the school system. Interestingly, Labour MP Siobhain Mcdonagh (who also served under the Blair government) has criticised this bill and these proposals for changing academies. She has shared concerns over schools losing their freedoms and the power to determine their own curriculum. 

One complexity that means we will not know the significance of a new mandated curriculum for all state secondary schools is the fact that the Department for Education is currently conducting a large-scale curriculum review. Therefore, we are waiting to discover what the new curriculum reforms will mean for schools. As the government seeks to unify the ways all pupils are taught, it is difficult to understand the extent of the consequences of this until we know what the curriculum will demand to be taught. For example, the impact on relationships, health and sex education (RSHE) or religious studies (RS) lessons is still unknown and could have considerable impact on the ability to share about Christianity in schools.

Firstly, whether you are a parent or not, I would encourage you to pray for our schools. Be praying for the Department for Education as they assess the curriculum and decide what should be taught across the nation – particularly for subjects such as RS and RSHE as changes to these subjects could have profound impacts. 

If you are a parent, keep engaging in your child’s education. Are you talking about what they are learning at school? Are you communicating with their teachers or the senior leadership? There are many opportunities to get more involved, whether through parent-teacher meetings or governors’ meetings. 

2025 could bring huge changes to our schools and therefore to the education that our nation’s children receive, so I encourage you to bring all your concerns about it to the Lord.