Last month, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was debated in Parliament. The bill includes major reforms that will help to protect children who are hidden from sight due to being out of mainstream education.
The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel Annual Report 2024 highlighted that children facing harm outside the home, such as exploitation, are often not enrolled in school, miss education, or have poor attendance. Therefore, the bill will also improve multi-agency safeguarding arrangements to quickly identify significant harm.
According to recent government data, the number of home educated children has doubled since the pandemic, with 150,000 children missing from education at some point during last year.
The bill will bring in unprecedented safeguards for home educated children including; children not in school registers, stronger powers for councils to make sure children are getting the right education, and a unique identifying number for every child. It will also ratchet up powers for councils and compel local authorities to establish dedicated, multi-agency safeguarding teams to keep track of children.
To find out more about this bill, please read more here.
At asphaleia, we are passionate about seeing young people reach their potential and we will be looking to see the impact of this bill on outcomes and achievement for young people in our local community and beyond.