The King’s Speech: what next for Education?

It is now clear that the main areas of policy focus and legal change affecting education will be children’s wellbeing, educational standards, the effect of employment law changes on education, and a particular focus on skills.

We will be sharing Stone King’s perspective on these changes as they unfold, and we will be publishing separate comments for state funded schools, independent schools and further and higher education shortly.  This bulletin provides our initial key comments.

Children’s Wellbeing Bill

This legislation will address children’s opportunity to experience wellbeing from a number of angles, and is planned to be introduced in the first session of the new parliament.

There will first be generic “strengthening [of] multi-agency child protection and safeguarding arrangements” with the aim of “keeping children safe, happy and rooted in their communities”. The Labour Manifesto indicated this could include annual inspection of safeguarding, attendance and off-rolling. 

On a related note, the Bill will “Enable serious teacher misconduct to be investigated, regardless of when the misconduct occurred, the setting the teacher is employed in, and how the misconduct is uncovered”.

There are also specific changes to support children and their families through legal restrictions on school uniform and the introduction of free breakfast clubs in every primary school.  The latter could be life changing for many children but, given the current staffing crisis in schools, it may be difficult to implement for those schools that do not have such clubs (about 20% of primary schools).

The Bill will also make system changes to ensure education is more “consistent” and “safe” for every child.  Within this part, there are some potentially significant changes to the powers and duties of individual schools, including:

• Admissions: all schools will have a duty to cooperate with their local authority on school admissions, SEND inclusion, and place planning. This will involve giving local authorities greater powers, which may cut across the current relative autonomy of academy schools in particular. The overall future role of local authorities in education will be one of the most interesting aspects of new government policy.
• Other particular changes for academy schools, namely them being obliged to teach the national curriculum, and academy trusts being inspected by Ofsted as well as their schools; this Ofsted change will necessitate a profound development of Ofsted capacity to understand and inspect multi school governance. 

Although not in this bill, the government, as part of its health reforms, will “ensure mental health is given the same attention and focus as physical health”.  Hopefully this will help address the current mental health provision challenges in education. 

Legislation specifically affecting independent schools

The King’s Speech specifically stated that “Measures will be brought forward to remove the exemption from Value Added Tax for private school fees” with the stated purpose (as stated in the Labour Manifesto) of funding “six and a half thousand new teachers”. This step will likely be implemented through finance legislation.

The Children’s Wellbeing Bill will also give further powers for Ofsted to investigate the offence of operating an unregistered independent school, which may have particular effects in certain parts of the education sector (for instance, proprietors involved in religious education and special education).

Further education: a key focus

The Labour Manifesto had a particular emphasis on skills, and this priority continues in the first raft of legal changes. 

The Skills England Bill

This bill is also planned to be introduced in the first session of the new parliament.

It will establish a single body, Skills England, with the objective of bringing together businesses, providers, unions, mayoral combined authorities (MCAs) and national government to “ensure we have the highly trained workforce that England needs”.

This ambitious initiative aims to develop a single picture of national and local skills needs and ensure that national and regional skills systems are meeting skills needs and are aligned. 

Skills England will also grip the further development of apprenticeships by the transfer of functions to it from the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE). The government also intends to reform the apprenticeship levy into the growth and skills levy, with further details to be developed here.   

We anticipate there will be a particular focus in the first months of the new government to get these massive projects properly underway. 

An English Devolution Bill will give further powers to metro mayors and combined authorities, to make devolution the default approach across England, with a further expansion of local decision making regarding further education. 

Employment law changes

We have published a more detailed bulletin on these critical changes which can be found here. The key changes in the Employment Rights Bill will be:

• Making parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal available from day one on the job for all workers (subject to probationary periods to assess new hires);
• Security and predictability, banning zero-hour contracts, ensuring that all workers get reasonable notice of any shift changes with proportionate compensation for any cancelled shifts;
• Ending practices surrounding ‘Fire and Rehire’ and ‘Fire and Replace’ by reforming the law to provide effective remedies and replacing the previous statutory code; 
• Making flexible working the default from day-one for all workers, requiring to accommodate this as far as is reasonable;
• Making developments to Trade Union Legislation, removing “unnecessary” restrictions on Trade Union activity;
• Reinstating the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, to establish national terms and conditions, career progression routes and fair pay rates;

Alongside the Employment Rights Bill, a separate Equality (Race and Disability) Bill seeks to implement the full right to equal pay for ethnic minorities and disabled people. 

Although the draft bills are expected to be “introduced within the first 100 days of the Government taking office”, it is unclear at this time as to what exactly will be included within the bills and what the proposed timeframe will be for the legislation coming into force.

Watch this space for more commentary from Stone King 

The full King’s Speech background providing detail on the above is here and we will be providing our own, more detailed perspective soon.