The King’s Speech: how will it affect the education sector?

On 17 July 2024 we heard the King’s Speech which set out the Labour government’s vision and priorities for the education sector over the coming months. 

The speech was positive for the sector, stating the government’s ambition to ‘raise educational standards and break down barriers to opportunity’. But what changes can we expect to see in education? Joanne Davison, partner, and Carla Boaks, solicitor, in our education team, take an in-depth look below. 

What did the King’s Speech declare for education? 

The King’s Speech proposed two new Bills for the education sector. 

Firstly, the Children’s Wellbeing Bill which aims to raise standards in education, ensure children are fairly treated irrespective of their background and promote children’s wellbeing. The Bill will seek to achieve this through:

• Ensuring all primary schools offer a free breakfast club.
• Limiting the number of branded items schools can require as part of school uniform.
• Requiring local authorities to maintain a Children Not in School register and provide support to home-educating parents.
• Enhancing powers of Ofsted to investigate unregistered schools and poor care in children’s homes.
• Bringing MATs into the inspection system rather than school-level inspections only.
• Strengthening safeguarding.
• Increasing powers for local authorities around admissions, particularly around SEND inclusion and place planning.
• Requiring all schools to teach the national curriculum.
• Ensuring all teachers have or are working towards Qualified Teacher Status (QTS).

Secondly, the Skills England Bill which will create a new organisation, Skills England, to form a partnership with employers. Skills England intends on supporting sustained economic growth through bringing together businesses, providers, unions and other bodies to boost skills training and tackle skills shortages. Responsibilities will be transferred from the Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) to Skills England to make skills sector more efficient.

The speech also set out plans to remove the exemption from VAT for private school fees with the additional income allocated to fund six and a half thousand new teachers, and reform of the apprenticeship levy. 

From an employment perspective, the key elements of the King’s Speech that will affect schools (which are expected to be primarily  in the proposed Employment Rights Bill) include: banning ‘exploitative’ zero-hour contracts; ending the practice of ‘fire and rehire’; making the protection from unfair dismissal and certain family friendly, flexible working and sick pay rights a ‘day one’ right; introducing mandatory ethnicity and disability pay reporting for large employers; reinstating the School Support Staff Negotiating Body to establish national terms and conditions, career progression routes and fair pay rates; and updating trade union legislation to remove unnecessary restrictions on trade union activity and ensure industrial relations are based on good faith negotiation and bargaining. The Equality (Race and Disability) Bill will introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay reporting for larger employees and enshrine in law the full right to equal pay for ethnic minorities and disabled people.

How will this affect my school or trust?

We will not see the full impact of the proposed new Bills until they have been debated by Parliament and officially become law. 

However, you can expect schools to face broader admission challenges, receive additional funding to facilitate free breakfast clubs and more funding flowing through early years and schools coming under pressure to follow the national curriculum. We expect trusts to come under the scrutiny of Ofsted and be subjected to inspections in a similar way as school inspections to enhance trust accountability.

In anticipation of the changes in education, we have already seen an immediate stop to single headline grading by Ofsted. Instead, headlines will be replaced by grades in four categories: (1) quality of education; (2) behaviour and attitudes; (3) personal development; and (4) leadership and management. By scrapping the single headline grades, Ofsted aims to provide parents with a more detailed overview of a school’s performance. We are expecting Ofsted to go a step further with the introduction of "School Report Cards” in 2025 to further breakdown grading and provide a more complete picture of a school’s performance. From early 2025, the government will also introduce regional improvement teams that will work with struggling schools to quickly and directly address areas of weakness.  We have now also seen the closure of ESFA, with some changes effective from 1 October 2024 and closure by 31 March 2025.

Whilst there was little in the King’s Speech about childcare, Labour’s manifesto refers to the expansion of access to childcare for families and for spare school classrooms to be converted into spaces for nurseries. This is reinforced in the letter to the education workforce from Education Secretary Briget Phillipson dated 8 July 2024 which states that ‘this government will expand our early years education system’. We have already seen many of our education clients seek amendments to the age range of their schools to allow for 2-year-old provision in anticipation of additional early years funding.

If you have any questions on the proposed changes for the education sector and how they will affect your school or trust, please contact Joanne Davison by email at [email protected] or by telephone on 0191 211 7958 or Jill Donabie by email at [email protected] or by telephone on 0191 211 7933.