Overview of the Act
- The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act (2026) ("the Act") helps deliver the Labour Party’s 2024 commitments to remove barriers to opportunity in schools and improve the education system to make it safer for every child.
- It also delivers commitments in the Labour Party’s 2024 manifesto on Children’s Social Care by strengthening regulation, improving quality of care to ensure it meets children’s needs and keeping children rooted in their families and local communities where possible.
- These explanatory notes should assist the reader to understand what each part of the Act means in practice; provide background information on the development of policy; and provide additional information on how the Act will affect existing legislation in this area.
- The Act makes provision relating to education in England and, in some cases, Wales and Scotland. Further details on extent and application are set out in the section on territorial extent and application. The Act is structured in 3 parts. These are:
Part Summary Part 1: Children’s Social Care This Part makes provision in relation children’s social care, in particular to:
Offer Family Group Decision Making, by:
· Mandating local authorities to offer a ‘family group decision making’ meeting at the point the local authority is seriously considering applying for a care or supervision order, to give all families an opportunity to come together and make a proposal in response to concerns regarding the child’s welfare.
Ensure child protection and safeguarding, by:
· Strengthening the role of education by automatically including education and childcare agencies in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.
· Requiring safeguarding partners to make arrangements to establish and run one or more multi-agency child protection teams for the local area.
· Improving information-sharing across multi-agency services with an information sharing duty and making provision for the specification of a single unique identifier (also known as a Consistent Identifier), to better support children and families.
Provide support for children in care, leaving care or in kinship care and carers, by:
· Requiring local authorities to publish a kinship local offer.
· Promoting education achievement by extending the role of Virtual School Heads to children in need and children in kinship care on a statutory basis.
· Requiring local authorities to provide staying close support to eligible care leavers under the age of 25 where their welfare requires it. Staying close means support to find and keep accommodation and to access services relating to health and wellbeing, relationships, education and training, employment and participation in society.
· Requiring local authorities to include information setting out their process and procedures to ensure a planned and supportive transition between care and independent living for care leavers as part of their published local offer for care leavers.
· Ensuring care leavers are not to be regarded as intentionally homeless.
· Placing a duty on local housing authorities to notify educational institutions, GP practices and health visiting services in England when a child is placed in temporary accommodation.
Ensure accommodation of children, by:
· Legislating for accommodation of looked after children: regional co-operation arrangements to harness local authority buying power.
· Providing a statutory framework to authorise a deprivation of liberty for children who need it to keep them safe, in accommodation other than a Secure Children’s Home, designed with the primary purpose of care and treatment.
Regulation of children’s homes, fostering agencies etc, by:
· Establishing powers of Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills ("CIECSS") in relation to parent undertakings (also referred to as "provider groups" in these Notes) by strengthening Ofsted’s powers to hold provider groups in relation to children’s homes and other children’s social care accommodation providers to account.
· Establishing powers of CIECSS in relation to imposing monetary penalties expanding their powers for breaches of the Care Standards Act 2000, including for unregistered children’s homes.
· Introducing financial oversight of registered persons and their parent undertakings.
· Legislating for the power to limit profits of registered persons in the future, if other market intervention measures do not have the desired effect.
· Introducing the power for the Secretary of State to impose monetary penalties and the procedure for imposing such penalties.
Legislating in relation to care workers, by:
· Regulating the use of agency workers in local authority children’s social care.
· Ensuring that the legislation on protection against ill-treatment or wilful neglect applies to children aged 16 and 17 in certain care and detention settings in England.
Legislating in relation to corporate parenting responsibilities, by:
· Introducing new corporate parenting responsibilities for Secretaries of State and public bodies that impact on the lives of looked after children and care leavers.
Legislating in relation to the employment of children, by:
· Introducing new arrangements on the employment of children in England and Wales, and in Scotland.
Part 2: Schools School meals, breakfast clubs etc. by:
· Legislating to provide free breakfast clubs in primary schools in England.
· Legislating in relation to food and drink to be provided at Academies.
· Expanding eligibility for free meals to all children from households in receipt of Universal Credit from September 2026, lifting 100,000 children out of poverty.
· Extending an existing duty to make arrangements for supporting pupils with medical conditions to include statutory allergy safety duties and conferring powers on the Secretary of State to make regulations imposing specific duties relating to the management of allergies.
School Uniform, by:
· Legislating to set a limit on branded items of school uniforms.
Guidance about mobile phones in schools, by:
· Requiring all schools in England to have regard to guidance issued by the Secretary of State on pupils’ use and access of mobile phones and other personal interactive communication devices during school hours.
Children not in school, by:
· Registration: introducing a duty on local authorities in England and Wales to have and maintain Children Not in School registers and provide support to home-educating parents.
· Requiring local authorities in England and Wales to take into account the suitability of the home and other learning environments when children are first registered on Children Not in School registers and when determining whether children should be required to attend school; and empowering local authorities to request to visit children in their homes.
· Improving the efficiency of the school attendance order process in England and Wales.
· Introducing a local authority consent mechanism for withdrawal of the following children from school: children on child protection plans or who were on child protection plans in the last five years, children subject to current section 47 enquiries, and children at special schools.
· Empowering local authorities in England and Wales to require that children who are being home educated and are subject to the aforementioned child protection processes (or were on a child protection plan in the last five years) attend school when school is in their best interests.
· Introducing a requirement for mandatory meetings between parents and local authorities to be piloted in up to 30% of local authorities in England and 30% of local authorities in Wales before children can be withdrawn from school for home education, with the power to roll this requirement out nationally.
Independent educational institutions, by:
· Expanding the scope of regulation under Chapter 1 of Part 4 of the Education and Skills Act 2008 to cover more settings that provide a full-time education to children.
· Strengthening the powers to make independent educational institution standards by allowing for standards to be set by reference to whether the Secretary of State considers a proprietor to be a fit and proper person.
· Creating powers to allow the Secretary of State to temporarily suspend the registration of an institution and to impose a stop-boarding requirement.
· Placing the burden of proof on a proprietor to demonstrate future compliance with regulatory standards, where a proprietor appeals an enforcement decision to de-register to their institution.
· Making changes to the material change regime, which requires registered institutions to seek the Secretary of State’s approval before making specified changes to their operations (for example, by introducing a new category of material change related to the buildings made available for student use).
· Giving the Secretary of State express power to remove an institution from the register, where the proprietor has agreed to this in writing.
· Giving the Secretary of State the power to impose a relevant restriction on a proprietor that makes an unapproved material change.
· Increasing Ofsted’s powers to investigate certain criminal offences connected with independent educational institutions and introducing a new sentencing power in the form of prevention orders.
Inspections of schools and colleges, by:
· Making technical changes related to when Ofsted needs to report on the quality of certain other inspectorates and to give Ofsted powers to share information with them.
Teacher misconduct, by:
· Strengthening the system for regulating the teaching profession, including making changes to 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.
School teachers and qualification, by:
· Reaffirming the professional status of teaching by ensuring that new teachers entering the classroom have, or are working towards, Qualified Teacher Status, which will ensure children benefit from professionally qualified, well-trained teachers. This measure will also extend the statutory induction requirement to newly qualified teachers working in academies.
Academies, by:
· Introducing a duty to follow the new National Curriculum following the expert-led curriculum and assessment review.
· Making provision for academy school pupils to be educated outside their school to improve behaviour.
· Introducing a power to secure performance of proprietor’s duties.
· Repealing a duty to make an academy order in relation to schools causing concern.
· Introducing trust inspections and an associated intervention power.
Pay and conditions of academy teachers, by:
· Requiring academy schools and alternative provision academies to follow a minimum level of remuneration set out in secondary legislation at the same level as maintained schools.
· Requiring these academies to have regard to the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document in determining conditions of employment of academy teachers, which means they must follow it unless they have a good reason not to.
· Repealing the exemption which allows schools in education action zones to depart from the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document.
School places and admissions, by:
· Requiring co-operation between schools and local authorities.
· Introducing a power to direct admission of an individual child to all types of school: extension to Academies and additional triggers.
· Providing greater powers in relation to the functions of the schools adjudicator in relation to admission numbers.
Establishment of new schools, by:
· Amending processes for the establishment of new schools, including removing the requirement for academy proposals to be sought in the first instance, and making changes to other processes for inviting and publishing proposals to establish new academies and schools maintained by local authorities.
Part 3: General This part sets out general provisions:
· Power for the Secretary of State to make consequential provision in connection with any provision in this Act, including in other Acts passed before this or later in the same session.
· Power for Welsh and Scottish Ministers to make provision that is consequential on certain provisions made by the Act in relation to matters that are within the legislative competence of the Senedd Cymru and the Scottish Parliament respectively.
· Regulations.
· Financial provision.
· Extent.
· Commencement.
· Short title.
