King's Speech 2024 - Children’s Wellbeing Bill

Wednesday, 17 July 2024 11:30

Children's Wellbeing Bill “A Bill will be introduced to raise standards in education and promote children's wellbeing” The Children's Wellbeing Bill will put children and their wellbeing at the centre of the education and children's social care systems, and make changes so they are safe, healthy, happy and treated fairly. The Bill will remove barriers to opportunity and raise school standards to ensure the school system is fair for every child, no matter...Request free trial

Children's Wellbeing Bill

“A Bill will be introduced to raise standards in education and promote children's wellbeing”

The Children's Wellbeing Bill will put children and their wellbeing at the centre of the education and children's social care systems, and make changes so they are safe, healthy, happy and treated fairly.

The Bill will remove barriers to opportunity and raise school standards to ensure the school system is fair for every child, no matter their background and deliver our manifesto commitments on children's social care to ensure that all children can thrive in safe, loving homes.

What does the Bill do?

The Children's Wellbeing Bill will ensure our education and social care systems transform life chances for millions of children and young people in England.

The Bill will remove barriers to opportunity for children and their families by:

keeping children safe, happy and rooted in their communities and schools by strengthening multi-agency child protection and safeguarding arrangements.

requiring free breakfast clubs in every primary school to ensure that every child, no matter their circumstances, is well prepared for the school day and can achieve their full potential.

introducing legislation to limit the number of branded items of uniform and PE kits that a school can require to bring down costs for parents and remove barriers from children accessing sport and other school activities.

The Bill will improve the education system and make it more consistent and safer for every child by:

creating a duty on local authorities to have and maintain Children Not in School registers, and provide support to home-educating parents. These measures will ensure fewer children slip under the radar when they are not in school and more children reach their full potential through suitable education.

making changes to the legislation about regulating and inspecting independent schools, including by providing Ofsted stronger powers to investigate the offence of operating an unregistered independent school. These measures will help keep children safe and ensure they are receiving a suitable education.

making changes to enable serious teacher misconduct to be investigated, regardless of when the misconduct occurred, the setting the teacher is employed in, and how the misconduct is uncovered. This will protect and safeguard more children.

requiring all schools to cooperate with the local authority on school admissions, SEND inclusion, and place planning, by giving local authorities greater powers to help them deliver their functions on school admissions and ensure admissions decisions account for the needs for communities.

ensuring greater consistency between academies and maintained schools by requiring all schools to teach the national curriculum, giving every child a broad and rounded education. This measure will be commenced after the review of curriculum and assessment is concluded and is reflected in Programmes of Study. The review will set the foundations to equip every child with the essential knowledge and skills for the future.

recognising the status of the teaching profession and the difference that teaching makes to a child's education by ensuring any new teacher entering the classroom has, or is working towards, Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). This will be accompanied by recognising the essential role of support staff in schools by giving them a national voice in the setting of their pay and conditions.

bringing multi-academy trusts into the inspection system, to make the system fairer and more transparent, and enable direct intervention when schools and trusts are not performing to the highest standards.

Territorial extent and application

The territorial extent and application is to be confirmed but the Bill is expected to extend to England and Wales and apply to England.

Key facts

There are nearly 9.1 million pupils in the school system, with over 8 million pupils across more than 20,000 state-funded schools in England, 170,000 pupils in special and alternative provision and 600,000 pupils in private schools, as of January 2024. We must ensure that schools and local authorities work together to give children and families the school places they need in their communities.

1 in 4 children are in absolute poverty as of 2023. We know too many children's life chances are being scarred by rising poverty and too many arrive at school not ready to learn. Breakfast clubs will help tackle poverty by helping children get ready for the school day and support families with the cost of living.

Multi-academy trusts run over 45 per cent of state schools. The current inspection arrangements focus on individual schools, with no powers for the inspectorate to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of the trust in achieving good outcomes for young people across a trust's schools. There is considerable variation in trust level performance.

With 92,000 children recorded as being in home education as of October 2023, more children than ever are not in school (a 14 per cent increase since October 2022). Currently, no mandatory system of registration exists for these children. These registers are needed for local authorities to better identify these children so that they do not fall through the gaps, particularly when moving between different types of education or across local authority boundaries. The UK is a clear outlier in comparison to Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in relation to the lack of oversight of electively home educated children.

Under section 96 of the Education and Skills Act 2008, it is an offence to conduct an unregistered school in England. There is no reliable data on the number of unregistered and, therefore, unlawful independent schools. Unregistered independent schools are not subject to inspection and therefore provide no assurance that children attending are safe and receiving a quality education. Since 2016, Ofsted has carried out 854 in-person inspections of suspected unregistered schools. Work undertaken by the Department for Education, since 2016, has revealed weaknesses in the powers available to Ofsted to inspect this potentially criminal activity.