The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 17 December 2024. The Bill covers a broad range of areas from the safeguarding and welfare of children, to issues such as breakfast club provision and school uniform.

The Christian Institute is working on the Bill as it progresses through Parliament. Alongside proposed amendments to remove the requirement for a daily act of Christian worship in schools and change the law on Religious Education, we are paying close attention to the following three areas:

Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) – England

Creating transparency in RSHE is important. Proposed amendments would require all RSHE resources used to be accessible to the public, and ensure parents are able to view all materials in their school’s RSHE curriculum.

Previous changes to RSHE created an opportunity for activist groups to supply schools with resources that promoted an ideological agenda, often in stark contrast to the wishes and beliefs of parents. Consequently, and contrary to the DfE’s statutory guidance on RSHE, many resources were not factual or age-appropriate. For example, some primary school children were taught as truth that everyone has a gender identity, and that it was morally wrong or harmful not to accept this.

Parents are responsible for their children, for their upbringing and for the education they receive. This is why education law requires schools to consult parents regarding their policy on Relationships and Sex Education. However, the mechanisms to enforce these laws are inadequate and many educators may not know they exist or ignore them. It should be a basic principle of safeguarding that there are no secrets over what children are taught about sexual matters.

The Home Education Register – England and Wales

Some Christian parents choose to educate their children at home and this can be a positive choice. Others send their children to school. But it is crucial all Christian parents have the option to teach their children at home if necessary, for example, because they find the school is undermining their beliefs. It should not be an onerous or intrusive task for parents to do this.

The Bill would require parents to register their child with their Local Authority (LA), the LA to maintain the register, and other providers of education to supply information to the LA on request.

The sheer volume of detailed information required poses practical problems for parents and LAs and raises major concerns of principle. Parents would have to state the time each of them spends educating each child, and the names, addresses and time any other provider spends educating each child, and notify the LA of any changes within 15 days. This could include one-off events. The register would gather information that is not recorded about children educated at school, such as time spent at a Sunday school, and even their sexual orientation and religion.

The Government has set out no clear purpose for recording this sensitive data, which taken as a whole raises legal concerns and creates the impression that home-educated children are a suspect category. Third-party providers of education, such as piano teachers, might refuse to take home-educated children to avoid the risk of fines.

The Government must act to protect children but it is crucial the action is effective. In well-publicised cases where children suffered serious abuse or died while parents claimed they were being home-educated, the child was already known to social services. It is not clear how the register would work to protect such children.

Tribunal for parental complaints – England

Proposed amendments aim to provide parents with an effective means of escalating a formal complaint about a school and introduce a mechanism for better enforcing schools’ legal duties in the provision of education. This would empower parents who are concerned about the school’s delivery of RSHE, religious education or collective worship, or that the school is failing in its duty to be impartial. Presently Ofsted does not comprehensively monitor a school’s compliance with education law and it is often left to parents to raise concerns.

The amendments would introduce the option for parents to appeal complaints to a Tribunal, rather than to the DfE.