The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: Needs work to be fair to children with SEND

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The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will have its second reading in Parliament tomorrow (8/1/25), with “delivering change” and “breaking down barriers to opportunity” the slogans on which the Bill is based.

This new legislation will introduce various reforms across child protection, data-sharing, school admissions, teachers’ pay and other things. As Tania observed back in July when the Bill featured in the King’s Speech, it’s a whole smorgasbord of initiatives.

The Department for Education says the purpose is to protect children at risk of abuse and prevent vulnerable children falling “through the cracks”. Introduced in Parliament before Christmas, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, said it represents, “a child-centred government, with better protections for young people and real join up between children’s social care, schools and local services”.

So what changes will the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill introduce and how will children with SEND be affected? Some of the main changes are summarised below, but full details can be found in the policy document DfE has published alongside the Bill.

A Bill in two parts: social care and schools

The Bill is in two parts. Part one is concerned with children’s social care, but with a focus, inevitably, on protecting children who may be at risk of harm, rather than on supporting disabled children and their families. (The future direction of legislation underpinning social care for disabled children is still in the hands of the Law Commission, which will be making recommendations to ministers.)

In Part One, on social care, measures include a legal duty to offer “family group decision-making” meetings about a child’s safety and wellbeing and a stronger role for education settings in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

It will also create a duty to share information for safeguarding and promoting children’s welfare. This will include a single unique number (“identifier”) for individual children, to connect data between different services.

There are also measures, among other things, relating to kinship care, deprivation of liberty (DoL) for children at risk of harming themselves or others, and stronger powers for Ofsted to hold providers of children’s residential settings to account.

Part Two of the Bill focuses on schools and includes a few references to SEND, although provision for children with SEND is not the focus of this legislation. Some of the measures in Part Two have had a fair amount of publicity, such as access to free breakfast clubs for every primary school child, which was in the Labour Party’s election manifesto.

Free breakfast clubs for ‘every’ primary school child?

The CWB Bill requires state-funded schools to ensure that every child from Reception to Year 6 is, “provided with access to a free breakfast club before the start of each school day which lasts for at least 30 minutes and includes food”.

This duty will apply to maintained schools, academy schools and non-maintained special schools. My first question was “What about children who attend special schools?” How will it work in practice for special schools for primary-age children and what will the impact be, for example, on home-to-school transport arrangements, given that attendance at breakfast clubs will be optional for families?

So there is a caveat—of course there is. The policy notes on the Bill produced by DfE say:

“It is envisaged that there may remain some exceptional circumstances in which a school cannot meet the duty as it would seriously prejudice the efficient use of resources or not be in the best interest of their pupils.”

The legislation will allow the Education Secretary to grant exemptions. This means children in special schools—and their parents—may or may not have a chance to benefit from an initiative designed to improve children’s wellbeing and make life a little easier, potentially, for working parents.

Compulsory registers of Children Not In School

Another eye-catching aspect of the Bill is the plan to introduce a compulsory Children Not In School register in every local authority area in England. At present, parents do not need to inform their local authority if they decide to educate their child at home. The Government intends to change this.

A new duty will be introduced requiring parents to provide information about their child for the registers, so councils can keep track of where children are, to “support and protect” them where necessary.

Children will have to be registered if they are:

of compulsory school age,
living in the local authority’s area and not registered at a “relevant school”; or
living in the LA’s area who are registered at a relevant school but do not attend full-time; or
a student registered at a further education setting that provides education for children aged 14+ but they attend part-time and don’t also attend a school.

Permission needed to home-educate special school pupils

But it goes further.

For some groups of children, parents will need to get the consent of their local authority if they wish to home-educate. This will apply to children who are subject to an enquiry under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 (a “child protection enquiry”), or who have a child protection plan, or who attend a special school. The question is who determines what is in the best interests of a child with SEND – their parent or the local authority.

Local authorities will be able to “request to see the child in their home”. Where this is refused, they can issue an attendance order. The process for issuing school attendance orders will be reformed, and it will be an offence for parents to withdraw from school a child who is subject to a school attendance order.

DfE’s policy notes on the Bill say this “will ensure that the most vulnerable children cannot be withdrawn from school until it is confirmed that this would be in their best interests, and that the education to be provided outside of school is suitable”. Parents will be able to appeal to the Education Secretary if they disagree with the local authority’s decision.

Also read: SNJ’s advice and prompts for submitting evidence to the 2025 Education Select Committee’s SEND Inquiry

A duty to offer “support”, if wanted

The Bill will require local authorities to provide support to families on their registers, if this is what parents want. This support seems to be confined to “giving advice or information about the child’s education, if requested by the parent. Local authorities have discretion over what advice and information they think is appropriate to provide.”

The Government is emphatic that its intention is not to “criminalise” parents who home-educate but to help local authorities fulfil their existing education and safeguarding duties. It envisages the information collected by LAs about children who aren’t in school will be used for local policy development and planning.

“We will use the data to understand the reasons why parents home educate a child or why the child has been placed in alternative provision and identify any trends or common issues within a particular area. This could help improve understanding of SEND or issues like off-rolling, bullying or mental health.”

But this aspect of the Bill is particularly controversial. The apparent conflation of home education with safeguarding risk is being opposed by organisations that support and represent parents who choose to home-educate their children.

It’s vitally important that law-makers understand that the steady rise in the number of children with SEND who are ‘electively’ home-educated is driven in large part by parents responding in desperation and despair to their children having been failed at school.

Promoted

Legal duties to cooperate on school admissions and place planning

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will introduce new duties on mainstream state schools and local authorities to co-operate on admissions, and for mainstream, special and alternative provision state schools to co-operate with local authorities on place planning.

If this works as it should, provision for children with the full range of special educational needs should be considered and planned in advance, ending the situation where too many children don’t receive the school place they need until they reach crisis point (if indeed they receive it at all). It should also mean school places closer to where the majority of children live, reducing those home-to-school transport bills that bother local authorities so much.

Local authorities will also get the power to direct academies to admit a child who has been refused admission to, or been permanently excluded from, every suitable nearby school.

They will have greater powers to ensure school admissions decisions reflect local needs and will be able to object to a school’s published admission number (PAN) if they think the number fails to meet the needs of the local community.

Further, LAs will be allowed to open new schools and will be able to invite proposals for all types of school, rather than being dependent on free schools. The ultimate decision, though, will rest with the Education Secretary.

All of this is broadly welcome.

The current situation where local authorities have responsibilities for children in their area with SEND without always having the necessary powers to make things happen locally is neither satisfactory nor sustainable.

But as we’re all too aware from the experience of the Children and Families Act 2014, just because a legal duty exists, it isn’t enough in itself to guarantee that children with SEND receive the provision and support they need, and to which the law entitles them. So we will be looking for a clear commitment from ministers to making this actually work in practice.

What happens next?

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will be discussed on Wednesday 8 January by MPs, who will then vote on whether it should move on to the next stage – detailed examination by a parliamentary committee, which is the point at which amendments to the Bill can be introduced both by the Government and by opposition MPs.

There’s a long way to go before it becomes law, and MPs and peers will receive representations along the way from people with a wide range of perspectives on the issues it covers. We will keep a close eye on how it develops and will keep reporting on how it looks for children with SEND.

Just to recap, the main provisions (taken from Hansard), including some not discussed above, are:

Bringing academies in line with other state schools, by requiring new teachers to have qualified teacher status, extending the national pay and conditions framework to teachers in academies, and requiring academies to teach the national curriculum.
Giving councils the power to direct academies to admit an individual child who cannot be admitted to any other nearby school.
Repealing the duty to convert schools with poor Ofsted ratings into academies.
Introducing a compulsory Children Not in School register in every local authority.
Banning schools from requiring more than three branded uniform items.
Introducing statutory timeframes for issuing school attendance orders and making it an offence for parents to withdraw children who are subject to school attendance orders.
Introducing new powers to inspect and seize evidence from suspected illegal schools.
Repealing the “free school presumption” requiring councils to first seek to open an academy before opening a school of its own.
Introducing a power to cap the profits made by children’s social care providers.
Mandating local authorities to offer family group decision making, bringing extended family members together before a child enters social care.
Creating a unique identity number for children across services, similar to the National Insurance number for adults.

Let us know what you think about the Bill.

Also read:

What kind of government is “bold” enough to scrap statutory EHCPs from vulnerable children?

EOTAS: Education Otherwise Than At School. What is it, and can I get it?

Schools White Paper: What do we know so far about funding for SEND?

The SEND reforms in the Schools White Paper reveal rights given, and rights stripped away

ADHD and Autism Right To Choose referrals paused as at least nine NHS areas tell providers to stop booking assessments

Nancy's tips for writing an EHCP parental statement

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Catriona Moore

Catriona Moore has a background in policy and communications and has worked for a number of health, social care and disability organisations.

When her younger daughter was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome in 2009 shortly before her second birthday, Catriona found herself dealing in practice with things she’d previously thought she understood in principle.

She juggles her work as policy manager for a national charity with caring and advocating for her daughter. She's passionate about improving the lives of disabled children and their families, and making the systems that should support them work more transparently and equitably.

Catriona writes for Special Needs Jungle in a personal capacity, and all views expressed are her own.

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