Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill

The Department of Education has presented a bill to parliament which will be relevant to safeguarding practitioners and is an important read for anyone involved in safeguarding. It is described as:

"A Bill to make provision about the safeguarding and welfare of children; about support for children in care or leaving care; about regulation of care workers; about regulation of establishments and agencies under Part 2 of the Care Standards Act 2000; about employment of children; about breakfast club provision and school uniform; about attendance of children at school; about regulation of independent educational institutions; about inspections of schools and colleges; about teacher misconduct; about Academies and teachers at Academies; repealing section 128 of the Education Act 2002; about school places and admissions; about establishing new schools; and for connected purposes"

For a full policy summary, please see here

What is the purpose of the Bill?

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is a key step towards delivering the government’s Opportunity Mission to break the link between young people’s background and their future success. It will put in place a package of support to drive high and rising standards throughout our education and care systems so that every child can achieve and thrive. It will protect children at risk of abuse, stopping vulnerable children falling through cracks in services, and deliver a core guarantee of high standards with space for innovation in every child’s education.

What are the main benefits of the Bill?

The ambitions of the Bill are set out in seven key parts:

• Making a child-centred government
• Keeping families together and children safe
• Supporting children in the care system to thrive
• Cracking down on excessive profit making
• Driving high and rising standards for every child
• Removing barriers to opportunity in schools
• Creating a safer and higher quality education system for every child

What are the main elements of the Bill?

The measures in this Bill will deliver on manifesto and Opportunity Mission commitments:

• Make a child-centred government by enabling children with complex needs and who are at risk of or need to be deprived of their liberty to be placed in community provision; strengthening Ofsted’s powers in relation to children’s social care providers by giving them the power to issue fines for breaches of the Care Standards Act 2000, including to unregistered providers, and enabling them to hold provider groups to account for quality issues in the provision of care; limiting the use of agency workers in children’s social care; and protecting 16 and 17 year olds from ill-treatment or wilful neglect.

• Keep families together and children safe by mandating local authorities to offer family group decision making so that all families have an opportunity to form a plan of family-led care, improving information sharing across and within agencies, strengthening the role of education in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and implementing multi-agency child protection teams.

• Support children in the care system to thrive by requiring local authorities to publish their local offer for children in kinship care and their carers, extending the virtual school head role to children in kinship care and those with a social worker, and strengthening our offer of support for care leavers by requiring local authorities to provide ‘Staying Close’ support to eligible care leavers where their welfare requires it – this gives support to help find and keep suitable accommodation and access services – and requiring local authorities to publish the arrangements it has in place to support and assist care leavers in their transition to adulthood and independent living.

• Crack down on excessive profit making by including a backstop law to give the government a new power to cap the profit providers can make should that be necessary; supporting the creation of regional care co-operatives to improve the forecasting and commissioning of placements; establishing a financial oversight scheme to increase financial and corporate transparency of ‘difficult to replace’ care providers and their corporate owners.

• Drive high and rising standards for every child by establishing core national standards on which schools will be able to build and around which they can innovate, by delivering on commitments on school admissions, qualified teacher status and the national curriculum. Further measures include proposals for all types of new schools, ending the academies presumption in favour of prioritising any local offer which meets the needs of children and families.

• Remove barriers to opportunity in schools by delivering manifesto commitments on providing access to free breakfast clubs for every primary school child and limiting the number of branded uniform items that schools can require.

• Create a safer and higher quality education system for every child by introducing Children Not In School registers to help ensure no child falls through the gaps when educated not in school. To help protect children who are most vulnerable, parents will have to obtain local authority consent to home educate if a child is subject to s47 enquiry of Children Act 1989 or under a child protection plan. It will also extend the registration requirements, already in place for independent schools, to more Independent Educational Institutions which could be expected to provide all or the majority of a child’s education and make changes to improve arrangements for the regulation and inspection of independent schools; and the consideration of cases of serious teacher misconduct to make sure help can be mobilised for every child that needs it.