The UK government is making a radical departure from its predecessor’s education policy, with plans for big changes in the national curriculum, home education and safeguarding, and the relationship between schools and local authorities.
The new children’s wellbeing and schools bill introduced to parliament on December 17, alongside other proposed reforms, suggests the Labour government is working on a much broader front than the previous Conservative administration. It ends a 14-year focus on trying to raise attainment in England’s schools by turning them into academies free of local authority control.
Instead, the bill shifts power back towards local authorities, giving them the ability to open schools that aren’t academies, as well as more jurisdiction over children who aren’t in school.
The original plans for the bill as included in the King’s speech focused on tightening regulations at the margins of the school system. This included a register of children who are homeschooled and ramping up Ofsted’s scrutiny of independent schools operating unlawfully.
The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has now confirmed the bill includes a number of proposed changes to the school system. It will bring academies and free schools broadly in line with maintained schools on key issues, including teachers’ pay and conditions, qualifications and teaching the national curriculum.
The bill comes alongside a raft of reforms currently underway. These include a review of the curriculum and assessment, repair work to the “broken” special educational needs and disabilities system, boosts for early years provision and several changes to how Ofsted inspects schools.
The Academies Act 2010 paved the way for successful schools to opt out of local authority control and convert to academy status. Additionally, local authorities were not permitted to open new schools from 2011.
All new schools would instead be “free schools”, which were proposed by groups of interested individuals regardless of whether a new school was needed or not in an area. Free schools and academies have a funding agreement with the secretary of state rather than receiving their funding from local authorities.
The result is a fragmented education system in England in which approximately half the schools remained with local authorities and half had become academies or new free schools.
Academies and free schools were permitted to set their own pay and conditions, employ non-qualified teachers and not teach the full national curriculum. Contentiously, any maintained school judged “inadequate” by Ofsted could be forced into a multi-academy trust via a legal order.
The results are decidedly mixed. Many trusts have taken on schools which had never performed well historically and dramatically improved outcomes. The performance of some secondary free schools is celebrated as they are now in the top 20 nationally for student progress.
However, while standards in English schools have risen since 2010, there is no overall evidence that academies improve faster than maintained schools. Some academies, even in the most successful trusts, and free schools have been judged “inadequate” by Ofsted, demonstrating that this structural change is no panacea.
The new bill also introduces a raft of measures on child safeguarding, particularly involving home education. This is currently under the spotlight following the tragic death of Sara Sharif, who was removed from her school before she was killed.
Local authorities have had few powers to monitor home education, although estimates now put the number of children in this group in England at over 100,000. Varying efforts by the previous Conservative government to introduce a register of home-educated children ended in failure.
Parents have educated their children at home long before the advent of state education in the late 19th century. The Education Act 1996 states that home educated children must be provided with full-time provision which is suitable for their age and ability.
In recent years, numbers have grown rapidly. In many cases, parents choose to home educate because their children were being bullied at school or were not having their special needs met. Increasingly, parents have decided to home educate because of their children’s poor mental health.
The new bill will require local authorities in England to have registers of children not in school so they can monitor what is happening in their area. Additionally, if there are child protection concerns, or the home is not deemed suitable, local authorities will have the powers to intervene and require school attendance. And a proposed child identifier number is intended to keep information on vulnerable young people joined up.
The children’s wellbeing and schools bill brings together schools and children’s social care with the new regulations on home education. And it will create a level playing field for schools regardless of their status after fourteen years of championing academies and free schools at the expense of the rest.
These tectonic changes will take time to embed after years of cultural separation among those who work with children.
