New children’s wellbeing and schools bill aims to bring to an end decades of high-profile academy freedoms

Three freedoms which have been handed to academy trusts over the past two decades are to be scrapped if a new children’s wellbeing and schools bill, which was being introduced into Parliament today, become law.

The government is reportedly moving to require academies to follow teachers’ pay and conditions arrangements and the national curriculum, as well as mandating that all new teachers to be working towards qualified teacher status before they enter the classroom.

Meanwhile, the legal requirement that ministers must issue academy orders for all schools which fail Ofsted inspections is to be scrapped, in favour of the ability of the Secretary of State, if necessary, “support academisation by other means”.

Councils will also be able to set up new schools under the legislation – replacing the current “free schools presumption,” whereby local authorities identifying the need for a new school have to seek proposals for an academy.

All schools “will have to co-operate with councils on school admissions,” as Schools Week put it, with councils given “greater powers to ensure admissions decisions reflect local needs including the placement of vulnerable children”.

The bill will reportedly also see parents losing their automatic right to educate their child at home if their child is subject to a child protection investigation or plan, with a children’s register and a national unique identifier number for children also being introduced.

Brief analysis

The three changes put forward for the academies sector – on pay and conditions; the curriculum; and qualified teacher status – could be seen as the biggest reforms to the policy since it was launched back in 2000.

They will clearly be significant not least in symbolising the Labour government’s decision to “smooth” the differences between the academies and local authority maintained schools sectors. However, on some aspects, only a small number of institutions may be affected.

On pay and conditions, most of the controversy around remuneration has come at the top end, with the leadership of large multi-academy trusts in particular receiving much more, per pupil, than their counterparts in local authority leadership have done. However, the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) does not cover trust leadership, so moving academies to parity with maintained schools on teachers’ pay and conditions will not affect this. (There has been some suggestion, however, that trusts’ central operations, including leadership, could have to follow national pay arrangements for support staff, under the separate Employment Rights Bill, also currently going through Parliament).

In my experience, most academy trusts do follow national pay and conditions arrangements for classroom staff, even though legally they have never had to do so. Only one counter-example comes to mind at the moment, among cases covered by this website, whereby a trust has used its freedom to set pay and conditions terms which, on this particular aspect at least, appeared worse than that on offer in local authority maintained schools.

This was the case of Brampton Manor Academy in Newham, East London, which I reported on intensively in 2021 following an employment tribunal case involving a young teacher with multiple sclerosis.

The school, led by a superhead paid more than £250,000 a year, was offering only statutory sick pay of less than £100 a week, Education Uncovered reported at the time. Under the STPCD, teachers are entitled to full pay for 25 working days during their initial months of service, rising to full pay for 100 working days and half pay for 100 working days, from their fourth year of service.

On the curriculum, similarly as far as I am aware most academies are following the national curriculum as maintained schools have to do. Some high-profile exceptions have been covered by this website, however.

Michaela Community School, in Brent, north London, appeared as of last year not to be offering computing/information technology at all as part of its normal daily lessons, while design and technology did not appear on its list of subjects on its website and music was only being taught until year eight.

Similarly, primary schools in Westminster, central London which are part of the Future Academies chain have in the past controversially not offered computing.

The bill implies changes to such approaches, where they are still ongoing. Any response from Michaela in particular, a school with a relatively narrow curriculum which celebrated the best results of any school in England on the Progress 8 GCSE measure earlier this month, will be interesting to watch.

But in terms of how many schools are likely to be affected in practice, I think the third element, requiring all new teachers to be working towards qualified teacher status (QTS), may have the biggest impact on the ground.

As research I carried out for the Campaign for State Education earlier this year indicated, there are substantial differences between the proportions of teachers working without QTS in the academies sector, versus the situation in the maintained sector.

That investigation found that the proportion of teachers working in “sponsored” primary academies without qualified teacher status, at four per cent, was more than twice the 1.8 per cent seen in LA maintained primary schools. In the secondary sector, 4.5 per cent of teachers in “sponsored” academies were unqualified, compared to 2.9 per cent in maintained schools.

In maintained schools, teachers have had to be working towards QTS in order to be in the classroom, whereas this has not been the case for academies. If the above differential rates are a product of this difference, then, the impact of this bill could be statistically quite large.

Union reaction, and recent history

Reactions this morning from unions representing teachers and school leadership has been broadly positive, with some interesting takes on individual aspects.

Daniel Kebede, the National Education Union’s general secretary, said: "We fully support the announcement that all teachers will be covered by the same pay and conditions framework (STPCD) regardless of whether they teach in a community school or an academy. Having the same pay and conditions framework enables teacher mobility across the school system and is obviously fairer, by making sure all teachers work under the same protections. We hope this takes us closer towards a fair national pay structure, with no element of PRP [performance-related pay], with mandatory pay levels and with career stages that are sufficient to value, recruit and retain the teachers and leaders our schools need.”

The union also welcomed the move to end the requirement for ministers to force schools into academy status when they failed an Ofsted, but urged the government to go further in terms of flexibility around the academies system.

Mr Kebede said: "The Secretary of State pledged a re-set with the profession and to value the expertise and dedication of the workforce, so it’s a relief to hear the ‘duty’ to force schools into multi-academy trusts will go. It was never evidence-led policy. We’re going to push during the passage of the Bill for the option for schools to leave MATs so that schools can join local rather than national ‘groups’.”

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers said: “[The bill] includes a helpful attempt to start to address a school system that has become overly fragmented and unnecessarily divided. At the heart of the Bill appears to be the welcome message that a school is a school, regardless of its governance structure. School leaders in academies and maintained schools alike share the same goals and aspirations for the children in their care and are wrestling with the same challenges.

“We support moves to ensure there is greater consistency between different types of school and to bring greater alignment to the system. We have long argued that the national curriculum should apply to all schools and that every pupil should be taught by a qualified teacher – and we believe this will be welcomed by parents too.”

Both unions, plus the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) and the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) welcomed the moves around home education.

However, ASCL also indicated some caution around the moves on the academies policy – perhaps reflecting the much greater proportion of academies led by its (secondary-phase) members, compared to that of NAHT.

ASCL’s general secretary Pepe Di’lasio said: “On the plans specific to the school system, work will be needed to get these measures right, and the government must bring all parts of the sector – academies, other types of schools, and local authorities – with them on these changes in a positive way.

 “The education sector has been through very significant structural changes over the past decade, and leaders and their staff have worked incredibly hard to make those structures work well in the best interests of children and young people.

“Further changes must be done with care and must not seem ideological.”

Some of the measures being put forward in the bill today carry echoes of those tabled in the Conservative government’s doomed schools bill from 2022. That had included moves to bring about more standardisation in the supervision of academies by the DfE. However, that bill foundered after sustained opposition in the House of Lords, including from Conservative peers with close connections to the academies policy.

Education Uncovered is aiming to track the passage of the bill closely in the coming weeks.