The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is still grinding its way through Parliament. While the breakfast clubs have been piloted, RISE school improvement teams have started their work and the curriculum and assessment review has presented its final report, the sweeping changes to academies and free schools have yet to become law.
Having rushed the bill out before Christmas 2024, the government followed up a month later with the necessary impact assessments for the clauses within the legislation to show that it had considered all the options and was progressing with its plans in full knowledge of the effects.
It would be entirely understandable if you missed these assessments. But on the anniversary of their publication, it is worth revisiting their contents.
The Schools Bill: what impact will it have?
The impact assessments include an overall rationale for intervention, which lists the “extensive evidence” to support the government’s planned action in two areas, but not to support its action under the heading “driving high and rising standards for every child”.
The government has not defined the problem it is trying to solve here - it has only identified that academies and free schools do things differently. Not worse, just different.
Buried in the impact assessments is a blunt admission: extending qualified teacher status (QTS) requirements to all teachers is predicted to reduce new entrants by between 700 and 1,250 a year.
That is not a marginal effect.
Teacher recruitment
At a time when schools are already struggling to recruit and retain staff, the government is knowingly pressing ahead with a measure that reduces entrants to the profession.
Opposition to this clause is not opposition to teacher training - it is an expression of confusion as to why, at a time when the rest of the labour market is becoming more fluid with people having three or four careers, the government is erecting barriers to entry into teaching.
Perhaps the clearest example of how the bill will impact a school, though, concerns the number of pupils that it will be allowed to admit. Changes will mean that local authorities will be able to challenge a school’s published admissions number (PAN) not only when it is reduced but also when it is maintained or increased, if it is deemed to create a “viability issue” for another school.
Viability, I guess, is in reference to finances rather than educational quality.
Free-school admissions
If a high-performing school attracts strong parental demand - many free schools are oversubscribed - the bill creates a mechanism by which that success can be capped in order to protect weaker, less popular provision.
The impact assessments acknowledge that this move could “limit the ability of popular schools to grow” and “negatively impact on parental preference”.
The bill has spent all this time going through Parliament, yet these deficiencies remain. But there is still room for hope that it can be improved.
Parent school choice
Amendment 199, for example, seeks to introduce an explicit quality marker into decisions about PAN changes. That would be a modest but meaningful step: a recognition that capacity planning should not be blind to standards.
But even if this amendment is made, the deeper issue will not be captured by any impact assessment. The bill represents a steady move towards increased centralisation and a corresponding reduction in the space for local initiative and innovation.
The real impact of that shift will not be fully visible next year or even in five years’ time. It will be seen a decade from now, in a system that has fewer routes in, fewer ways to grow excellence or support innovation, and less freedom for schools to respond creatively to their communities.
Schools will, as ever, do their best for their pupils. The question is whether this legislation helps or hinders them in that task. On the government’s own evidence, the answer remains uncomfortably clear.
Meg Powell-Chandler is director of the New Schools Network
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