Schools Bill “Reforms to education will help every child fulfil their potential wherever they live, raising standards and improving the quality of schools and higher education.” The purpose of the Bill is to: ● Level up opportunity by delivering a stronger and more highly performing school system that works for every child, regardless of where they live. The main benefits of the Bill would be: ● Supporting school to be part of a family of schools in a strong trust to level up school standards and thus enable all children to achieve their potential wherever they live and whatever their background. This will support the ambition that by 2030, 90 per cent of primary school children will achieve the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, and the percentage of children meeting the expected standard in the worst performing areas will have increased by a third. ● Ensuring that funding is allocated on a fair and consistent basis for all schools wherever they are so all schools deliver world class outcomes for their pupils. ● Strengthening the school attendance regime so children can benefit from being in school. ● Providing the tools to improve safeguarding for children wherever they are educated, including through ‘children not in school’ registers. The main elements of the Bill are: ● Strengthening the regulatory framework for academy trusts and establishing new statutory standards to drive clarity and consistency of expectations for academy trusts, underpinned by intervention powers to ensure action can be taken to tackle serious failure if it occurs. ● Supporting more schools to become academies in strong trusts by removing barriers to conversion for faith schools and grammar schools and bringing schools into the academy sector where this is requested by local authorities. ● Enabling better, more targeted, and more consistent multi-agency support to the children and families who need it most across England by making necessary reforms to the attendance legal framework. The Bill will require schools to publish an attendance policy and will put attendance guidance on a statutory footing, making roles and responsibilities clearer.
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