Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether the provisions in Part 4 of the Schools Bill (independent educational institutions) remains their policy.

The department’s position on the Schools Bill will be confirmed in due course. The policies support the department’s objective of ensuring that all children receive a safe and suitable education, and the department remains fully committed to taking forward these measures, including through legislation where this is necessary.

Part 3 of the Schools Bill would place a duty on local authorities in England to establish and maintain Children Not in School registers, to provide support to home educators when requested, and update the process for School Attendance Orders to improve efficacy. Part 3 also includes measures on school attendance, which would place the Department’s recently published school attendance guidance ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ on a statutory footing, introduce a national framework for the issuing of fixed penalty notices pertaining to attendance, and bring consistency in how all state funded schools grant leaves of absence in extenuating circumstances.

Part 4 of the Schools Bill seeks to improve safeguarding for children who do not attend state funded schools. It would extend the school registration requirement so that all settings serving children of compulsory school age full time are required to provide a safe and suitably broad education. It strengthens the powers allowing Ofsted and the Department to investigate and take action against illegal unregistered schools. It would also improve the regulation of registered independent schools by ensuring that school registrations correctly reflect each schools safe capacity, age range and other characteristics, and includes measures to improve enforcement powers to better address the needs of children at failing and unsafe schools.