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Impact of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Today I am going to consider the impact of the new bill for your average primary school.

I am therefore going to focus on part 2 of the bill, as that section contains the information directly relating to schools. There is a huge amount in just this section, but for me there are several key takeaways.

  • The appropriate authority of a relevant school in England must secure that breakfast club provision is available, free of charge, for all qualifying primary pupils at the school.

This is obviously huge but although the burden of providing this service is clearly placed on the local authority, rural schools in particular are unlikely to be able to meet this expectation due to a lack of staffing and or premises availability. I am concerned for my colleagues in rural schools as parents may vote with their feet if things are not put in place quickly and my experience of local authorities suggests that change will take time. There does appear to be a 'power to exempt' a school from having to provide this, but that would not stop parents going elsewhere.

  • Academies are now covered by the food standards in terms of the food that they provide their children

As I did not work in an academy I did not know this. Anything to improve the food we offer children must be a good thing.

  • The appropriate authority of a relevant school may not require a primary pupil at the school to have more 25 than three different branded items of school uniform for use during a school year

I feel that this one is aimed more at academies than at local authority schools, as all of the LA schools I have worked with have maintained a sensible and sensitive approach to school uniform. There seems to be a trend in this bill for cracking down on academies, which is about time in my view.

  • A parent of a relevant child must obtain the consent of the relevant local authority to withdraw the child from school if the parent intends— (a) that the child should cease to attend the school at which the child is a registered pupil, and (b) to withdraw the child from school for the purpose of causing the child to receive education otherwise than at school.
  • A local authority in England must maintain a register of children who are eligible to be registered by the authority under this section. 

This is a significant and positive step. The bill goes into detail about the powers that Local Authorities will have if children are not receiving an appropriate home education, and I welcome these, although I am not sure of the capacity they have to make a difference if needed. 

My experience is that up till now schools have expressed significant concern about home schooled pupils internally, but have felt unable to express these concerns outside of the school gates. It felt like we were expected to keep our mouths shut for fear of assassination over social media, and I clearly remember being told by a representative from my LA that the LA had no opinion about home schooling. If this is the start of things changing then bring it on.

Within the bill there is the usual stuff about introducing a more joined-up approach regarding safeguarding, but we have seen all this before. It sounds great but I don't think that the burden is on schools there. The only worrying aspect is that it appears that they are going to give schools a greater voice but also more responsibility when it comes to safeguarding. My experience is that this is usually a signal of more delegation of responsibility to a profession that is already overloaded. Perhaps this time it will come with support too. Either that or maybe the legislation is being written to ensure that those organisations who are not currently maintaining the highest possible level of safeguarding (if there are any) up their games asap.

The other positive step included in the bill is the end of forced academisations for 'failing' schools. For too long the culture has been one driven by fear rather than support and this has been a huge factor in people leaving the profession. Nobody is arguing for lowering expectations of our schools, it is just that we need an understanding that fear is not the answer.

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