UK Government publishes Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Many of these proposals will impact the day-to-day work of family social workers, and we are eager to hear how the government envisages the proposals will work in practice

The UK Government has today published the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, their Bill to “protect children and improve education” in England. Ministers have said that the Bill focuses on “making sure no child falls through gaps between different services and that families can get help when they need it”.

The Bill is set to:

  • Introduce new registers to identify children who are not in school
  • Create a new unique identify number for children across services – similar to the National Insurance number scheme
  • Parents will no longer have an automatic right to home school their children if the child is subject to a child protection investigation or plan
  • If a child’s home environment is assessed as unsuitable or unsafe, local authorities will also now have the power to intervene and require school attendance for any child
  • £500m total to be spent on Family Help services
  • All Councils will offer Family Group Decision Making - a service that brings extended family members together where a child is on the brink of entering care
  • A requirement on councils to publish a local kinship offer
  • Crackdown on excessive profit-making by children’s social care providers, including introducing a backstop law to potentially cap the profit providers can make.   

For education, the Bill will:

  • Allow Councils to be able to welcome proposals for all types of school, not just academies
  • Require all new teachers will hold or be working towards Qualified Teacher Status before they enter the classroom
  • Every schoolteacher will have the same core pay and conditions offer

Responding to the publication of the Bill, BASW Chief Executive Dr Ruth Allen says:

“We welcome this governments commitment to prioritising the wellbeing of children in the first year of this parliament. The headlines of the Bill are promising, and we await the full publication of the Bill to properly scrutinise the proposals.

“Many of these proposals will impact the day-to-day work of family social workers, and we are eager to hear how the government envisages the proposals will work in practice. We have long supported measures to limit profiteering by private providers, improve financial transparency, and strengthen not-for-profit provision.

“In addition to this Bill, we need to see this government take preventative action to address the challenges that face families, such as poverty. That must include scrapping the two-child limit as we will not tackle child poverty – and the repercussions of child poverty – without doing this.”