The Children's Wellbeing and School's Bill: a guide for schools and colleges

The Children's Wellbeing and School's Bill was introduced in December 2024 and is currently working its way through parliament.

It's in two parts: part one deals with children’s social care and aims to improve the safeguarding of children and part two aims to raise educational standards. This post summarises the main changes that will affect schools and colleges. 

Breakfast clubs 

All state funded primary schools will have to provide breakfast clubs. These must be available each school day and last at least 30 minutes and end immediately before the first lesson. The food must meet school food standards. 

The club doesn't have to be hosted at the school, but it does need to be within its ‘vacinity’.

The government will publish statutory guidance to help schools prepare for this.

School uniforms

The Bill will limit the number of branded items state-funded schools can ask children to wear as part of their uniform. It defines a uniform as ‘a bag or any clothing required for school or for any lesson, club, activity or event facilitated by the school’. This goes beyond the typical school day and includes extracurricular activities.

Branded is also defined. It doesn't just include items of clothing with the school's name. It includes clothing that is only available from a particular store and has a ‘distinctive characterisitic, such as colour, design or fabric’.

Register of children not in school

Children who are being educated outside of school for some or all of the time, such as through home education will have to be registered with the local authority. Schools will be required to notify local authorities when parents intend to home-educate their children. 

Regulation of teachers

The Bill will make changes to the regulatory regime for teachers, following concerns that some teachers may ‘fall through the gaps’ and be allowed to carry on teaching in the future, despite having potentially engaged in serious misconduct or committed a relevant offence. For example, an individual employed in school teaching post 16 students could be guilty of unacceptable professional conduct and/or conduct that may bring the profession into disrepute. But, a similarly engaged person teaching similar aged students in a FE college, or via an on-line learning provider aren't subject to the Teaching Regulation Authority.

The Bill will also allow for teachers to be investigated by the TRA regardless of whether they were employed as teachers at the time of the alleged misconduct or a relevant offence. 

Teachers pay and conditions

The Bill will require all state-funded schools, including academies to comply with the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) in order to standardise pay and conditions across the education sector. Senior leaders of academy trusts are excluded.

The School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) will include academy representatives in the annual national pay review process. 

The STPCD sets out various terms, including annual pay uplifts, statutory pay ranges, salary safeguarding, directed time limits, and guaranteed planning, preparation, and assessment (PPA) time.

The Department for Education (DfE) has published an amendment to the Bill, to clarify how the provisions relating to pay and conditions will work as follows:

• it requires all state schools to follow the minimum pay bands set out in the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) but allows academies to continue paying teachers above the maximum STPCD pay ranges;
• requires academies to have ‘regard’ to the rest of the terms and conditions in that document but they can vary from these ‘in the best interests of pupils and staff’; and
• gives governing bodies of maintained schools the right to set the pay and working conditions of school teachers equivalent to the relevant powers of academies.

Academy schools

The Bill will make very significant and wide-ranging changes to academy schools and the rules they have to follow. 

In short, the Bill will ‘roll back’ many of the freedoms these schools were given when the current academy framework was set up. Academies will be subject to most of the same duties as maintained schools – that is, schools funded and overseen by local authorities. The Conservatives’ Schools Bill of 2022-23 also included provisions on academies; these were controversial and most were removed at Lords’ report stage (before the Bill was abandoned). The current government says these changes are necessary to bring more consistency and drive up standards across the school sector.

Academies will have to teach a revised national curriculum (currently they only have to offer a ‘balanced and broadly based curriculum’), follow national pay and conditions rules for teachers (although that has been watered down a bit - see above), employ qualified teachers in most circumstances, and admit particular children if directed to do by a local authority.

New schools

The bill would also make changes to the current process for opening new schools, and to how school admissions work. It will restore local authorities’ powers to propose new maintained schools, although opening an academy would still be an option. Schools (including academies) and local authorities would also have to cooperate more closely when taking annual decisions about school admissions criteria, and there would be new powers to challenge some admissions policy decisions by individual schools.

Independent schools

The Bill will make a series of changes to expand the regulation of independent educational institutions that provide all or a majority of a child’s education. 

All independent schools that provide all or a majority of a child's education will be required to register with the Secretary of State and adhere to the Independent Schools Standards. Ofsted will be given increased powers to investigate unregistered, and therefore illegal, independent schools.

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