On Wednesday (January 8) the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill received its second reading in the House of Commons – offering MPs their first chance to debate the Bill’s proposals.
The proposed legislation covers a range of issues including plans that would see all councils holding “children not in school registers” to keep track of all students being home educated.
The registers would list all children not registered at a school or other alternative provision and councils would be given a legal duty to support any families on the register should they request help with educating their children.
However, the proposed new law will mean that parents will no longer have an automatic right to educate their children at home if their child is subject to a child protection investigation or under a child protection plan.
And if a child’s home environment is assessed as unsuitable or unsafe, local authorities will also be given the power to intervene and “require school attendance for any child”.
The new legislation will have implications for schools and other education providers. It would require schools to check with the local authority if a child can be removed from the school roll immediately, or if they fall into one of the categories which require parents to obtain local authority consent before they can be removed for home-education (see DfE, 2024; Long et al, 2025).
If the latter, then the local authority will consider whether the child can be removed or not: “The local authority must inform the parents and the school of their decision. If consent is granted, the school will remove the child from its register.” (DfE, 2024).
It comes as research from the Education Policy Institute published last term found that, in 2023, up to 400,000 children aged 5 to 15 were not in school, with only around 95,000 of these being formally registered for home education.
England’s children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza has long campaigned on this issue. Most recently in September, she published data showing that more than 11,500 children in England went missing from education over the course of one year, many with “particular vulnerabilities that makes tracing them even more urgent”.
The Department for Education (DfE) says that according to its data, around 111,000 children and young people are home-educated, up from around 55,000 pre-pandemic. The DfE says that 150,000 children were “missing education all together at some point during the last year”.
Given the high numbers of children missing from education, the Bill is proposing a new unique identifying number which will work like the National Insurance number for adults and which will help safeguarding and other agencies to keep track of children and young people.
The DfE says that this “consistent identifier” will allow those responsible for the safeguarding and welfare of children “to better join relevant data and identify children who will benefit from additional support”.
The DfE says it would conduct a regional pilot to test “the feasibility of using the NHS number, as recommended by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, as a consistent identifier across children’s services” (DfE, 2024).
The DfE confirmed: “This pilot will assess whether the NHS number improves information sharing for safeguarding and welfare purposes. If properly implemented, the consistent identifier could serve as a valuable tool to connect data across different services.”
In December, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s annual report (2024) warned that children experiencing harm outside the home, including exploitation, were likely to be not enrolled in school, to be missing education, or to have poor school attendance.
As such, the Bill seeks to strengthen multi-agency safeguarding arrangements to help agencies to “quickly identify significant harm”.
This includes new duties to compel local authorities to establish dedicated, multi-agency safeguarding teams to keep track of children. And a duty to share information for welfare and safeguarding purposes and for multi-agency teams to include a person with “education experience”.
Speaking on Wednesday as the Bill was debated for the first time by MPs, education secretary Bridget Phillipson said: “Keeping children safe will always be my first duty as education secretary, but we can only truly do that if we know where our children are. The sad reality is that at the moment there are thousands of children hidden from sight.”
Commenting on the Bill’s introduction, Dame Rachel said: “I have called on successive governments to introduce a unique identifying number for children and a register of all children not in school.
“Writing these two landmark measures into law will be of huge significance for any child currently at risk of harm in this country – it must now be supported by proper data-sharing between organisations so no child can become invisible in the system. For children who are at risk of serious harm or abuse today, there can be no delay.”
Elsewhere, the Bill, if given Royal Assent in its current format, will restrict academy freedoms, including by requiring academy schools to follow the national curriculum, follow the national teacher pay and conditions framework, and to ensure all teachers have or are working towards qualified teacher status.
The Bill also addresses the cost of school uniform with measures to reduce costs for parents by capping the number of branded items permitted (from September 2026) at three for primary schools and four (including the school tie) for secondary schools.
The previous government introduced stricter guidelines on school uniform which instructed schools to keep branded uniform items “to a minimum”. However, the DfE says its data shows that 24% of primary and 70% of secondary schools still require five or more branded items.
- Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel: Annual report, 2024: Click here.
- DfE: Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: Policy summary notes, December 2024: www.gov.uk/government/publications/childrens-wellbeing-and-schools-bill-2024-policy-summary
- Long et al: Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill 2024-25, House of Commons Library: Research briefing, January 2025: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10165/
- UK Parliament: Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, 2025. For details of the Bill’s progress, go to https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3909 and for the text of the Bill itself, see https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/59-01/0151/240151.pdf