The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and the Department for Children Schools and Families are bringing forward the Children, Skills and Learning Bill. Bill Ministers Rt Hon Jim Knight MP, Minister of State for Schools and Learners and Siôn Simon MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Further Education will be taking the Bill through Parliament. The Bill will reform education, training and apprenticeships for young people and adults, provide new powers to strengthen children's trusts, improve standards in schools and increase confidence in qualifications through the establishment of Ofqual. An outline of the Bill content is set out below, although some sections are still subject to consultation and have not yet been finalised.
1. Machinery of Government changes
In order to improve the delivery of education and training to young people and adults, the Bill will take forward significant reforms in these areas. The Learning and Skills Council (LSC) is currently responsible for the planning and funding of all post-16 education.
It is proposed that from 2010 local authorities (LAs) will have responsibility for commissioning and funding all education and training for young people up to the age of 19, making them the strategic lead for all children's services from 0- to 19. A new streamlined body, the Young People's Learning Agency (YPLA), will support and enable LAs to carry out their new duties.
Responsibility for funding post-19 education and training will be transferred to a new Skills Funding Agency (SFA), based on a new demand-led approach which will be supported by strengthened advice and support services for adults and employers provided by a new Adult Advice and Careers Service (AACS), National Employer Service and National Apprenticeship Service.
16 to 19
Responsibility for securing education for all 16- to 19-year-olds will be transferred to local authorities, who will plan, commission and fund provision for young people in their area. Because many young people may live in one LA but receive education in another, LAs will work together in sub-regional and regional groupings to ensure that commissioning plans are coherent and reflect the ways young people travel for provision across LA boundaries.
The primary purpose of the Young People’s Learning Agency will be to support and enable local authorities to carry out their new responsibilities by providing national frameworks to support planning and commissioning, ensuring coherence of plans, managing the national funding formula, and providing strategic data and analysis. Once LA commissioning plans are agreed by the sub-regional group and the regional planning group, the YPLA will check these to ensure that they fit together and are affordable. The YPLA will then fund LAs to meet their agreed commissioning plans. The YPLA will also have powers to intervene where there is significant risk that LAs will not be able to develop robust commissioning plans within the time constraints of the commissioning cycle.
19+
The SFA will be responsible for funding post-19 education. It will take a demand-led approach, i.e. funding will be provided to suppliers on the basis of the students they are able to attract. It will not undertake a planning or commissioning function. We will create a duty on colleges and providers to cooperate with each other in the delivery of adult skills provision.
Sixth-form colleges
Legally, sixth-form colleges (SFCs) are currently part of the further education (FE) sector. Though they have, and will continue to have, many features in common with FE colleges, they have also always maintained a distinct identity, which will now be reflected in a separate legal definition. We envisage that the main difference between SFCs and general FE colleges is that they will have a closer relationship with their home local authority and a single commissioning and performance management relationship with that authority. But the choice of whether to be an SFC or FE college will rest on whether an institution meets the criteria for SFC designation and its own assessment of where its core business lies.
16 to 18 transport
With the dissolution of the LSC, the role it currently takes in post-16 transport will end. Therefore, we are making changes to the LA duty to prepare and publish a transport policy statement to improve transparency and local accountability.
Learning in juvenile custody and adult prisons
Measures will aim to more closely align the education young offenders receive whilst in custody with that available in the mainstream sector.
Responsibility for securing education for young people in juvenile custody will be placed with LAs. Currently, education in juvenile custody is provided through a mix of arrangements in different establishments, some of which is commissioned by the LSC. LAs with juvenile establishments in their area will be under a new duty to commission and fund provision. They will be required to collaborate with relevant partners to develop commissioning plans and to submit these to the YPLA for approval, who will work to ensure that plans are consistent across the country. Funding will then be routed through the YPLA to the LAs. Many young people come from one LA area but are placed by the Youth Justice Board in custody under a different LA; therefore, a duty will also be placed on the ‘home’ LA to promote the young person’s educational attainment. This will help them to experience a quality education which is consistent despite these disruptions.
The SFA will take on responsibility for learning and skills provision for adults in prison from the Learning and Skills Council.
2. Apprenticeships
The Apprenticeships programme will be put on a statutory basis, all suitably qualified young people will be entitled to an apprenticeship place, and young people in schools will be fully informed about high-level vocational training opportunities. These measures support the Government’s plans for the expansion and strengthening of the Apprenticeship programme set out in “World-class Apprenticeships: Unlocking talent, building skills for all (January 2008).
A Draft Apprenticeships Bill was published on 17 July. The Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee and the Children, Schools and Families Committee are scrutinising the draft Bill. The public consultation on the draft Bill ended on 8 October 2008.
3. Establishment of Ofqual and QCDA
The Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families announced last September the intention to legislate to establish an independent regulator of qualifications and assessment, reporting to Parliament, to improve confidence in standards. The regulator, Ofqual, was established in interim form in April, and took on the regulatory functions of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). The Bill will provide for the set up of Ofqual on a formal basis, equipping it with a new set of powers. Ofqual will take a risk-based and strategic approach to regulation, meaning that the level of scrutiny Ofqual takes will be proportionate to the risk presented by the particular type of qualification. The QCA will evolve into the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, which will be responsible for developing and advising ministers on the curriculum and related qualifications, and for delivery of National Curriculum and Early Years assessments.
4. Children’s Trusts
The Bill will strengthen Children’s Trusts by putting Children’s Trust Boards on a statutory footing; extending the existing duty to cooperate to promote children’s well-being to include all maintained schools, academies, FE and sixth- form colleges and Jobcentre Plus; and placing a duty on the CT Board to prepare, publish and monitor a strategic Children and Young People’s Plan.
5. Sure Start children’s centres
Sure Start children’s centres have no established statutory existence; they are just one way in which LAs can choose to provide integrated early childhood services to meet their duties under current legislation. We have consulted on whether to give children’s centres a specific statutory basis thereby giving new duties to local authorities to establish and maintain sufficient numbers to meet local needs. This reflects current good practice, rather than creating any new requirements on local authorities or other service providers.
6. Funding of entitlement to free education for 0- to 5-year-olds
Changes will be made so that private, voluntary and independent (PVI) Early Years providers as well as maintained providers will be funded from the individual schools budget and be subject to the school funding regulations.
LAs currently have powers to issue warning notices to enable LAs to take early and effective action to tackle weak school performance before they result in school failure. If governing bodies do not comply with a notice to the LA’s satisfaction, the LA can require a school to make arrangements for advisory services or to take a partner to support them. Alternatively the LA may take back a school’s delegated budget, add additional governors or replace the governing body with an interim executive board (IEB). Warning notices are considered to be underused, resulting in too many schools being placed in special measures or significant improvement which LAs could have prevented. It is much more expensive and time-consuming in terms of the monitoring and support to rectify problems once a school is placed in this category by Ofsted.
The Bill will give the Secretary of State (SoS) powers to direct a LA to consider the use of a warning notice when the standards of pupil performance at a school are unacceptably low and the definition of unacceptably low will be widened to include pupils’ progress in relation to expected levels. The SoS will also be able to appoint additional governors or replace a governing body with an IEB once the LA has issued a warning notice.
The SoS will also be given a power to require LAs to take advisory services where they have a disproportionate number of schools where standards are unacceptable low and the LA has been ineffective in remedying these low standards.
8.Compliance with School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD)
LAs will be given powers similar to those outlined above (regarding warning notices) to issue compliance notices to schools which do not comply with the provisions of the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document. The Secretary of State will also be given powers to direct LAs to issue compliance notices to schools. The compliance notices will be similar to the warning notices outlined above and will allow - or require - LAs to take intervention measures if schools do not comply.
9. Creation of support staff negotiating body
There is currently no national pay structure to cover support staff who are employed to work in local authority maintained schools. The Bill will establish a body that will negotiate on, and agree, a framework for all schools in England to use when determining school support staff pay and conditions, in a similar way that the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document does for teachers.
10. Behaviour and attendance improvement partnerships
We propose to make behaviour and attendance partnerships statutory, and to require secondary schools (including academies though their funding agreement) to be part of a behaviour and attendance partnership. Currently, schools partnerships are voluntary and would typically comprise of six to ten secondary schools, although primary and middle schools can also join the partnership: 98 per cent of secondary schools are currently already members of partnerships.
11. Alternative provision
Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) are a type of school, set up and run by local authorities, to provide education for children who cannot attend a mainstream or special school. We are proposing measures to require local authorities to replace failing PRUs with a specified alternative, and to hold a competition for replacement PRUs, bringing the intervention regime for PRUs into line with that for mainstream schools.
The Bill will also propose a change of name for ‘Pupil Referral Unit’ and the Back on Track Next Steps document published in October proposes the name ‘Prospect School’.
12. Recording incidents of force to control or restrain pupils
Where staff have used force to control or restrain a pupil, which they are able to do where the pupil is endangering themselves or others to prevent injury, damage to property or serious breaches of school discipline, the school will be required to record and report significant incidents to that pupil’s parents.
13. Powers to search for alcohol, drugs and stolen items
The Bill will extend the powers schools and colleges currently have to search for weapons to cover alcohol, drugs and stolen items.
14. Parental complaints service
The Children’s Plan contained commitments to look at ways of improving the current complaints system, including those concerning bullying. Under the current system, a parent can contact the school, then the school’s governing body, and finally the Department’s SoS. However, the SoS is restricted in exercising these powers. We are currently consulting on ways to improve: handling of complaints at school level; the place of mediation services to resolve disagreements early on; and possible new arrangements to consider complaints that cannot be resolved at school level.
15. School inspection health checks
Ofsted intends to introduce school inspection arrangements where good and outstanding schools will be inspected less frequently - once within six years instead of once within three years. This can be achieved by amending secondary legislation. Six years is a long time between inspections even for the best schools. Therefore, Ofsted intends to publish a health check statement after three years to provide parents and others with more up-to-date information about progress in these schools. Primary legislation is required to enable Ofsted to publish the health check statement and to provide for its distribution.
16. Foundation degree awarding powers
Provisions to enable Welsh further education institutions the ability to apply for powers to award foundation degrees
17. Funding – collection of information (schools and children’s services)
Amendment of existing legislation (SSFA 1998) to require local authorities to prepare and publish statements of children’s services’ expenditure.
18. Right to request time to train
All employees will be given a right to request from their employer time away from their core duties to undertake training. The employer must consider the request carefully, but can decline it for a good business reason. There will be no obligation on employers to meet the costs of the training or to pay an employee’s salary during the training.
19.Individual voluntary agreements and student loans
Previously legislation was introduced to ensure that if a former student with a loan went bankrupt they would not have their student debt wiped out. This proposal will also close the loophole which allows students to have their student debt wiped out by entering into IVAs.
If you have any comments or questions about the Bill, contact the DIUS / DSCF Bill team at ChildrenSkillsAndLearning.Bill@dcsf.gsi.gov.uk
