The Schools Bill 2022
Currently at its third and final reading stage in the House of Lords, the 2022 Schools Bill seeks to legislate changes within school curriculums and administrative processes that were outlined in the Department for Education’s (DfE) March 2022 White Paper, “Opportunity for all - Strong schools with great teachers for your child.” The sections of the Bill work its way through a plethora of issues, from illegal unregistered schools to the regulation of Academies. However, it has been criticised by the Labour Party for being “narrow in scope, hollow in ambition and thin on policy”. A quick overview of the three most prominent areas of the Bill makes the reasons for this critique apparent – namely provisions regarding children who are home-schooled, the notion of absentee students and poor attendance in schools, and extensions upon the existing mechanisms for dealing with teacher misconduct.
1. Regulating Elective Home Education
In England, educating a child is compulsory, but doing so within the formal school system is not; and parents have a right under Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act to home-educate their children, suitable to their age, ability, and other special needs. According to the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), there has been a 34% increase in the number of children in elective home education (EHE) in the UK in the last few, bringing the number from 86,335 in 2019/20, to 115,542 in 2021/22. In the South West, only nine local authorities responded to ADCS’s 2020 survey, yet 6,674 children were found to be electively home-educated, accounting for 5.4% of children in the responding localities. While coronavirus lockdowns can undeniably be deemed a cause for the surge in EHE, areas in the South West have been reporting increases from long before – such as Wiltshire, where home education has increased by 23% in the two years since the start of the pandemic; but had experienced a 35% rise even in the year before.
As a larger fraction of the population move towards home-learning, it is important to note that a big demographic of such parents are not doing so in a proactive way, due to a heightened commitment to tailoring their child’s education, but in a way that is reactive – responding to a need to shield their children from racism, bullying, peer pressure and the systemic discrimination rampant within formal education. Leading Black tutors in the country have reported an increase in demand for online home learning over the last 18 months, with parents quoting risks of exclusion or discrimination, or other issues within mainstream education systems. Moreover, across all ethnicities, research from the University of Sussex found that the parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are increasingly finding benefit in removing their child from the stressful confines of the school environment, which subjects these children to additional stress, anxiety, and difficulty.
Thus, with a larger number of parents opting for home education, the Schools Bill [2022] attempts to legislate on the Government’s promise to “improve safeguarding for children wherever they are educated”, but it is clear this has not been done with the benefit of children and families in mind, but rather as a step with governmental and administrative benefit. The idea, per Section 33 of the Schools Bill, is to establish a register of “children not in school”, creating an obligation upon parents to supply details of their children’s home-educational arrangements to local authorities which allows local authorities to accurately improve their data on children who are educated outside of the formal system, and “enable support to be offered to interested parents of registered children.”
Criticisms:
The Section 33 provision depicts why the Labour Party deemed the Bill “hollow in ambition”; as the proposal of a register cataloguing home-educated children has evident administrative and data-gathering benefits; yet, it leaves to question how the register, by itself, provides any real impact or improvement to the families partaking in home-education – especially since the Bill very opaquely and loosely legislates upon the type of “support” from local authorities this register could result in. To exemplify who this register benefits, in 4800 responses to the 2019 consultation where the register was proposed, 96% of local authorities agreed with it and 82% of parents and young people disagreed.
Moreover, the notion of monitoring or registering home-educated children has been proved redundant elsewhere in different jurisdictions. A useful comparison can be made to New Zealand, where a policy was created in 2008 to register and gauge the standard of education that home-educated children were receiving. Upon carrying out monitoring assessments and finding 95% of electively home-educated children to be performing at equal or higher standards to schooled children, the decision to register and regulate was deemed pointless and discontinued.
The idea for a register can thus be said to be little more than a fact-finding and statistic-gathering endeavour on the government’s part – however, this is understandable and important as data within this sector has often been shrouded in opaqueness. For example, parents of children who have been home-educated from the start of their lives rather than withdrawing from school at a later stage, have no obligation to inform their local authorities. Due to policies like this, the UK has seldom been able to gauge the real extent of EHE in the country or carry out longitudinal research into the long-term impact on home-educated children as, for instance, in the United States. Hence this is a gap that can only be bridged through fact-finding endeavours; but framing these statistical-gathering tactics as something that is for the benefit of families is pointless, and pushing this narrative has only created protest and animosity.
Victoria Campbell of the Portsmouth Home Education Group has expressed concerns over local authorities “abusing” this register and overstepping this remit, causing damage to families in the process. For example, leaving it up to local authorities to determine the ‘standard’ of a child’s education opens families up to state scrutiny. One of the aspects of home-schooling is that it can be tailored to the needs of an individual child, and there is flexibility for different activities and interests; as well as to impart education to children that is specific to cultural or religious needs. Thus, the question lies on how parents who choose home education – whom already tend to be met with “automatic suspicion”– , will be perceived by local authorities, particularly when that “automatic suspicion” partners with negative racialized stereotypes, such as stereotypes of Black parents being absent or neglectful, or of religious education ‘radicalising’ children.
Thus, not only is the register something that does not bring any benefit to families – it may actually cause active harm to them. It is suggested that particular care would have to be taken by local authorities to ensure families are dealt with in an appropriate and sensitive manner.
Recommendations:
The Schools Bill (2022) should be amended, taking specific care to limit the scope of what a “children out of school” register would entail. Most public objections to the current provisions are due to the fact that the Bill empowers local authorities to demand any information from home-schooling families they see fit, including potentially discriminatory information on religion, sexuality etc. Thus, in response to this objection, this aspect of the Bill should be changed.
The Bill should obligate parents to inform local authorities of their child’s home-educated status, as this helps improve the national database and census. However, garnering any information beyond potential policy and statutory obligation should specifically be curtailed by the wording of the Bill.
As the Bill approaches the House of Commons stage after its final reading in the House of Lords, local MPs should be ready to raise the concerns of their constituents regarding the extent of regulation the Schools Bill allows. Most of the resistance towards the Bill lies in parents and home-education stakeholders believing it is a slippery slope towards excessive governmental interference, and this has been resulting in resistance towards even the basic recommendations of a data-gathering register. By removing or amending clauses that grant excessive regulation powers to local authorities, the Bill will be better received by stakeholding constituents.
Councils should make greater efforts to survey and interact with home-education providers, parents and stakeholders. So far, most parties with stakes in EHE laws have primarily been given a voice by journalists and reporters. Few calls for evidence or fact-finding initiatives have been launched at a local governmental level, leaving many gaps to be filled in discerning public attitudes towards, and recommendations for, the changing laws.
2.Increased Crackdown on Truancy
Sections 37 and 38 are other features of the Schools Bill 2022 that demonstrate how the interests of children and their families are not being centred as priorities. These provisions revolve around a ‘crackdown’ on absences taken by children from school, as well as creating a system that focuses on prosecuting parents for non-attendance.
“Try as they will, some parents cannot get their children into school. You cannot force a 14 year old out of bed, you cannot force a child into uniform who is refusing… You can imagine the stress this is causing.”
This decision to criminalise parents is not a move towards the support of a child’s right to education – or a protective mechanism against its failing – rather, it is a move that places vulnerable families all over the country who are already in dire straits, in an impossible situation: having to choose between their child’s physical or mental well-being, and the legislation-sanctioned anger of the system.
The Bill attempts to punish non-attendance without proper consideration for any of the barriers to attendance. It does not take into account the challenges and discrimination children face within the school system. In 2021, Freedom of Information (FoI) requests were sent to over 201 councils and many of England’s multi-academy trusts, which uncovered 60,000 racist incidents in the last five years. In the southwest alone, a report by Stand Against Racism & Inequality (SARI) for Bristol’s Commission on Racial Equality (CoRE) found that the second most frequent location for reported incidents of racial hate crimes, assault, and abuse were schools and colleges.
“K* has experienced issues with bullies that attend his school, but also live nearby. When he has tried to play with the children in his neighbourhood, he has been called a “monkey” and a “black boy” and he has had mayonnaise thrown over him.”
School, for many children, is thus a place linked to cruelty and terror with an institutionally discriminatory system which result in disadvantages that lead to exclusion, underachievement, and poor mental health. In the most extreme circumstances, direct assaults on the child’s safety and wellbeing originating from their peers (as well as guardians) can arise – as demonstrated by the recent ‘Child Q’ incident in a London school. As such, for many families, the barriers to school attendance are huge and insurmountable and have been especially aggravated at present, with many families living in increased hardship due to the cost-of-living crisis. In Bristol specifically, the rates of child poverty are currently the highest in the South West, with a third of all children, or 32.6%, having reduced access to food, clothes, and basic essentials required for daily participation in school. This figure amounts to ten children, for every thirty-child classroom in Bristol. Other indirect factors resulting from the cost of living crisis, such as an onslaught of illegal evictions reported by a respondent to a Black South West Network survey on the crisis, have had negative impacts on families’ abilities to maintain high attendance levels in schools.
At a time like this, when the barriers to school attendance are huge and insurmountable, criminalising parents does not improve attendance – rather grows those barriers by placing further stress on families and adding greater financial strain through fines. This aspect of the Schools Bill, which the Education Secretary has called “non-negotiable”, is a harsh, uncaring, and authoritarian rule that pays little regard to the socioeconomic or material realities of common people, and clearly prioritises sharpening administrative procedures, and improving the job-efficiency of attendance officers. If the priority of this Bill is to improve school attendance in any meaningful or community-centred way, criminalising overwhelmed parents should be the last remedial consideration.
Recommendations:
An improvement of in-school cultures and student-teacher relationships.
The safer, more comforted, and cared for by teachers that students feel within classroom walls, the more this is likely to positively impact attendance levels. According to a study in the US by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, 17.7% of school dropouts quoted the reason “no one cared if I attended”. Thus, training programmes for teachers and efforts within schools to make children feel individually cared for by the adults there will off-set the impacts of many of the peer-related barriers to attendance.Take the pressure off students through shorter school hours or school weeks.
While the UK DfE cracks down on truancy and debates the expectation for all public schools to ensure an elongated school week by mid-2023, still rooted in archaic models of regulating children’s learning; examples exist of alternative models from a plethora of different countries. In Finland, for example, the 20-hour school week (as opposed to the UK’s goal for 32.5 hours) results in a secondary school absentee rate, in 2019-2020, of 2% (Finnish National Agency for Education). In the UK, at that same time, the absence rate for pupils of the same age was 6.9% (Department for Education). Finnish students were also found to rank significantly higher in reading, maths, science, and multilingual capability, all through policies that valued children’s time, feelings, and energy.
3. Improving Investigations into Teacher Misconduct
In a May 2022 Memorandum, the government promised the Schools Bill would deliver “essential safeguarding measures” for children, and to do so, Section 51 of the Bill upgrades the regulatory regime for teacher misconduct.
Cases of serious teacher misconduct are investigated by the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA), which is an agency of the Department for Education that carries out the initial investigation into reports and cases, and decides whether they need to be referred to a professional conduct panel for a prohibition order to be issued. This order bans the teacher from the classroom, while the panel decides if, following a review, the ban is to be permanent or if the teacher can ever return.
The changes in the Schools Bill, broadly, increase the scope of the TRA’s powers to investigate and protect against misconduct. Section 51 allows investigation and consideration of teachers within a much wider range of settings, specifically expanding to rope in further education colleges, post-16 education, and per Section 51(4), teachers in online education. This sensibly closes a loophole in the prohibition order mechanism – wherein teachers banned from classroom entry by the TRA had the option of still going and teaching in the areas not covered by the TRA’s powers. Thus, this improves the safeguarding of children nationally.
A second change introduced in the Bill is in regards to how teachers are regulated after they have left the profession – meaning the TRA’s scope is being widened to allow referrals for misconduct even by teachers who may not currently be employed or teaching but may be thought to be between teaching jobs. The rationale is to pre-emptively ban such individuals from re-entering the profession and safeguard children from potential future threats.
Perhaps the most beneficial change, however, is that it closes an old loophole: the fact that the TRA (being a part of the DfE), could not consider referrals of serious misconduct uncovered by other bodies or officials working under the umbrella of the DfE; as this was seen as a self-referral. Due to the Schools Bill, there is no longer a need to wait for an external referral when an instance of misconduct is noticed. This closes a large gap in the remedial and regulatory process, as misconduct can now be investigated regardless of how it was brought to attention.
Criticisms:
While all in all, the Bill does good work in closing some of the gaps that existed in investigating teacher misconduct, parties vocal about the rights of teachers have raised a few concerns. The increased scope of which teachers can be brought to question by the TRA is a welcome change for example, but as Victoria Rees (Professional Discipline & Regulatory Team Associate, Richard Nelson LLP) points out, wording must be updated following the passing of the Schools Bill to make sure teachers in a further education setting are not caught up in the expansion of rules unnecessarily or unfairly; as most of the rules in place to safeguard children do not apply to those teaching adults in further educational settings. It is thus particularly up to consideration how an ‘unfair’ expansion of “misconduct” rules will negatively impact Black and Minoritised teachers in post-16 education who already, according to research by NASUWT (National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers) face barriers and discrimination within their teaching careers and are held to greater levels of scrutiny based on negative stereotypes.
Similarly, while there is sense in regulating the behaviours of teachers who have left the profession, for fear of them coming back; the question arises how it would be gauged that an ex-teacher does or does not want to return. This could hence result in costly, stressful, and unnecessary TRA hearings even for ex-teachers who have no desire of ever returning to a class. It also raises the question of why people who have chosen to exit a profession still have to have their behaviour questioned by the regulatory body for that particular job.
Written by Alishba Saadat. Edited by Angelique Retief, Saffron Karlsen, and Morayo Omogbenigun.