Every year since the inauguration of Yorkshire Bylines (and before that, in the Huffington Post), I’ve written an article called ‘Here comes the sun’ for the winter solstice, celebrating the day the northern hemisphere experiences its darkest day, and, at sunset, begins its journey back towards the light. This year, writing this account on the evening of the solstice, I’m going to look at the ‘return of the light’ in a slightly different way.
Here comes the sun?
This year, the most unpopular government in living memory was finally toppled in a summer general election. The Labour Party received a landslide vote, propelling Keir Starmer into Downing Street with 411 seats and a working majority of 165. This new start followed 14 disastrous years of Conservative governance.
It might seem then, that the British people could have reason to think that the day of the general election, falling a fortnight after the summer solstice, might mark the day that the sun would begin to emerge from behind the political clouds. But it is as yet unclear if Starmer’s administration will be able to deliver on the extent of reforming agenda required.
Children’s wellbeing
Nelson Mandela once said: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” So how does the new legislation measure up?
Education is a particularly tough arena for the incoming government. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government that took power in 2010 turned the role of education secretary over to right-wing Conservative Michael Gove. He had grandiose plans to completely revamp education in England, and as soon as he arrived in the ministry he set about the job from a rigid, autocratic and highly ideological perspective.
As a retired teacher and developmental psychologist, many of my articles are about the wellbeing of children and young people, and how government actions have far-reaching effects on their development, learning, and mental health. I was critical of the previous government’s policies for children and families throughout its time in power, and was bemused to find out last year that my social media activity had been monitored by the Department for Education (DfE) for this very reason.
In this article, I will explore the first major piece of Starmer government legislation for children and families – the children’s wellbeing and schools bill 2025 – considering whether it has the potential to bring some warmth and light back into this area of governance.
Why are the kids not OK?
I summed up my main concerns for children and young people in my May 2024 article, ‘Childhood and mental health: why the kids are not OK’. In it, I explored key issues relating to childhood wellbeing that I have been studying and writing about for over 25 years:
- Children’s need for high-quality, calm, focused time with the principal adults in their lives.
- The provision of state funding to free families with young children from the constant stress of grinding poverty.
- The need for all children to be educated in institutions where the main objective is provision that meets the needs of each individual, including pastoral care, and explicit recognition of issues at home and at school that affect mental health, behaviour and academic progress.
In November 2024, I looked at troubling issues swirling around multi-academy trust (MAT) corporations. This included their highly adult and business-focused orientation, and emergent information that they cost more (particularly through rewards given to top management) and achieve less than schools managed by local authorities. I had previously raised concerns about the operation of MATs in both 2022 and 2023.
In 2023, I considered the discord between adults responsible for delivering and managing education. I looked particularly at the harsh inspections which pit all-powerful Ofsted inspectors against teachers and headteachers doing their best in frequently difficult post-Covid and austerity circumstances. From this perspective, I also commented on the tragedy of a much-loved headteacher’s suicide following an Ofsted inspection.
Time for positive change
In February 2024, I considered the incompatibilities between the developmental processes taking place within the teenage brain and the online environment. I suggested some changes in legislation to curtail children’s ownership of networked devices and their use of social media. We clearly need to do more to prevent tragedies occurring when children act on harmful information that they have independently sourced online. And we need to protect them from bullying and manipulation that too often becomes relentless within the encapsulated online environment.
In the Online Safety Act 2023, the previous government attempted to address this by making the international mega-corporations that control the online environment responsible for protecting children from adult online content. How they intended to enforce this in a pan-global environment was unclear.
The 2024 Good Childhood Report found that children in the UK were the unhappiest in Europe. A follow-up survey found that their three most prevalent concerns were crime, environment and online safety.
It’s clear, therefore, that 14 years of Conservative government were a disaster for children and young people in the UK. Children born in 2010 have spent most of their childhood years under a government that corporatised schools and social care, and significantly increased childhood poverty.
It’s time for positive change.
Improving the lives of children and young people
At the beginning of the September parliamentary session, the new government tabled the children’s wellbeing and schools bill. It is scheduled to become law in the early months of 2025.
Its overarching aim appears to be ensuring that adults seamlessly work together across teaching and care, including consultants and agency staff. It envisions multi-agency child protection teams and information sharing, with children being allocated a single unique identifier number across all services, similar to the adult NHS number. This is to ensure that information across all sectors of the children’s workforce can be drawn together, which should flag up care and protection needs more effectively.
The bill sketches out a comprehensive set of measures to ensure that all adults who work with children in teaching and caring capacities are held to the same standards in terms of professional conduct and will be subject to the same investigative and disciplinary procedures when they appear to be falling short in some way.
These are positive aspirations.
Children in care
The bill contains a raft of measures to enhance support for ‘kinship carers’ – members of extended families who take over the care of children when parents are unable and/or unwilling to do so. As someone who has recently worked with kinship carers, I consider this a welcome development.
The bill contains measures to ensure that kinship carers receive extensive support and advice. This will help them care more effectively for the children they have taken into their homes. It will also provide them with enhanced directions to access available financial support.
However, there’s no reference to increasing financial support, or to offering any training to schools on how to work with children in kinship care. In my own experience, kinship carers’ most oft-stated concerns arise when the typically traumatised children, for whom they have taken parental responsibility, receive harsh disciplinary responses to minor behaviour violations at school. This is then exacerbated when subsequent efforts to liaise with staff meet with patronising responses or are completely ignored.
The bill also sets out a range of measures to protect children who are housed in non-familial settings from over-harsh disciplinary practices. It spells out that they may only be deprived of normal levels of developmentally appropriate liberty when there are clear indicators that without such measures, they are likely to become a danger to themselves or other people.
There will be an extension of social and financial support for care and secure accommodation leavers to independently settle into society, up to their 25th birthday. And 16 and 17-year-olds cared for in non-familial settings are to be fully encompassed within protection regulations that currently apply to younger children.
There will also be close monitoring of profits accrued from state funding given to private companies to provide services for children in non-familial care. This will not only apply to the provision of accommodation, but also supplementary and support services.
In an environment in which children in care may receive sub-standard services despite each one costing the public purse up to £281,000 a year, these measures are also very welcome.
Children in school
With respect to schools, the bill introduces universal breakfast clubs in primary schools to provide meals and childcare before the school day begins.
A limit is also to be placed on school rules relating to branded school uniform items, which will be limited to a maximum of three (four including a tie), to help parents with the cost of equipping their children, particularly at the secondary level.
There will also be more attention paid to children who are frequently absent from school, as well as enhanced monitoring of those who are being home-schooled.
Academies and multi-academy trusts
A range of measures are aimed specifically at academies and MATs. These are schools with independent management boards that are directly funded by the DfE. They are headed by a chief executive officer (CEO) who is assisted by a board of directors or ‘trustees.’ The body is called a ‘trust’ because it is allegedly not for profit. They run on a commercial business model.
The 2010–2024 Conservative government created the idea of the ‘academy’ from city technology colleges that had been pioneered by the Conservative government of the early 1990s, and charter schools in the United States. Gove gave them a variety of freedoms not extended to schools that remained under local education authority management. One of these was to vary their academic programme from the national curriculum. Another was to allow academies and MATs to employ adults as teachers who do not hold qualified teacher status.
Academies encompass only one school, while MATs run groups of schools. A range of concerns have been raised about MATs over the time they have been in operation, including examples of harsh disciplinary policies, excessive exclusions and questionable allocations of funding.
Changes for MATs and academies
Academies and MATs will in future be required to follow the national curriculum, and there will be increased monitoring of the ways in which they ‘perform their duties’ (including how they manage behaviour). From September 2026, all adults acting as teachers in schools, whether local authority, academy or MAT run, will be required either to have achieved qualified teacher status, or be working towards it.
The previous government compelled schools that were managed by their local authority to join a MAT if they failed an Ofsted inspection. This will no longer be the case. Academies and MATs will also be required to cooperate more closely with the education authority in their school(s’) location(s), particularly with respect to securing adequate provision for local children.
Profits accrued by academies and MATs will be put under additional DfE scrutiny, and the ways in which they allocate monies internally will also be carefully monitored. The focus will be on ensuring that public money allocated to educate the nation’s children is directly used for their benefit, rather than excessive salaries and employment perks for non-teaching CEOs and directors. There will be a renewed focus upon fair payment and career development for teaching staff.
The DfE will be empowered to impose monetary penalties and specific directions on academies and MATs which are judged non-compliant.
Starmer’s cautious reforms
In general, these proposals are welcome. They give the impression of a watery sun emerging from behind the storm clouds that hung over services for children and families between 2010 and 2024.
As we approach 2025, as far as children’s services are concerned, it’s clear that Starmer’s government has made a positive, if cautious start. But if we’re talking about rehabilitating the national soul, I’d need to see much greater reforming zeal than this.
I’d like to see a more focused investigative approach taken towards corporations awarding huge salaries to CEOs and directors on both academy/MAT boards, and private companies providing services to children in non-familial care. Evidence suggests a watchdog should be set up, with a similar remit to the Covid corruption commissioner, to consider how the law can be extended to pursue those who have been profiteering in education, health and care and, particularly in the case of corporation collapse, to pursue and recoup missing funds.
I’d also like to see schools treated in the same way as children’s social care facilities when it comes to imposing restrictions on children’s liberty. In other words, it should only be acceptable when agreed indicators have been used to test whether the children pose a danger to their own or others’ safety. This would significantly curtail the use of in-school isolation facilities and the growing trend of stringently limiting children’s use of toilets within the school day.
Restrict smart phones for children
Looking further into the future, I hope there will be a discussion about restricting children under 16 to using non-smart (‘dumb’) mobile phones that can call and text only. They would still be able to freely use the internet, but on devices that are logged into passwords controlled by adults over 18, who can check their browsing history.
Esther Ghey, the mother of Brianna Ghey, who was brutally murdered by two other children in 2023, reported that her daughter had been “very protective” over the password on her smartphone which had “caused arguments.” After she died, it emerged that she had accessed pro-anorexia and self-harm forums and websites. Brianna’s murderers had also used their smartphones to search the dark web for material that helped them plan how to stalk and kill another child.
Ghey proposed a change in the law to prevent these problems: “under the age of 16, you can have a children’s phone, which will not have all of the social media apps that are out there now… So if a child is searching the kind of words that [the child murderers] were searching, it will then flag up [so the parents are] able to get some kind of help.”
Of course, young people would inevitably find ways to exploit loopholes in any restrictive measures, in the same ways that they manage to get hold of cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. The point is that laws restricting their use of the internet would formally recognise their vulnerability, taking action to protect them in the same way that they are legally banned from smoking, drinking and accessing violent/sexually explicit media.
Such legislation would subsequently allow children’s services to trigger safeguarding procedures to deal with parents/guardians who systematically flout the law, using the same processes that teachers or social workers currently use if they discover that a child under 16 is regularly and knowingly allowed to drink, smoke and/or access pornography.
The stakeholder principle
Finally, by the early 2030s I would like to see an end to the current academy/MAT structure for schools. What has been demonstrated repeatedly is that, while it is not inevitable that the adults in charge will ‘top slice’ copious funds for salaries and perks from the public monies they are allocated, this is happening far too frequently. The current system gives children scant protection from profiteers; in this sense, it has a major safeguarding issue lying at its heart.
The MAT model creates many diverse problems. MAT boards tend to develop ‘company’ policies which may be feasible for a school in one area but not in another (for example urban/rural). Conversely, a MAT may take over all the schools in a particular area, giving parents no choice if they do not agree with the way it is administered (discipline policies being a major bone of contention), unless they’re able to drive their child a considerable distance to school, or pay for private education.
For example, Harris Academies, the MAT under Mumsnet discussion, runs 54 schools educating nearly 44,000 children in London and Essex. The Case Investigation reported that its CEO received a salary of £455k–£460k in 2021–22, and had said his Harris ‘company’ would pass to his family members when he died.
The reason that the 1980s Conservative government initially developed strategies to remove schools from local authority control was in pursuit of broadening parental choice. Four and half decades later, the result has been to narrow it considerably.
Passing schools back to local authorities is not the only answer though. What I would suggest is placing a limit on the size of MATs, so they cannot build impersonal, corporate empires in the way that they have been allowed to do under the previous government.
Academy/MAT boards could be restructured to operate on the same broad principle as the Thatcherite local management of schools. This would mean that they are comprised of stakeholder-governors – such as parents, teachers and local community representatives – ideally, in this incarnation, regularly liaising with a small advisory group of senior pupils. The headteachers would lead and coordinate groups of governors to appoint administrative staff as required, with senior administrator representatives also being allocated places on the board.
Take back control – yes, really
Hopefully the management of other public services, health and social care in particular, could also be adjusted to reflect this stakeholder principle. Starmer talked about regional devolution and ‘taking back control’ in his campaign for governance. I agree with him on this point. But ordinary people also need to be at the heart of such an initiative.
We need to take up the reins of the public services we pay for, and together make them work better for everyone in our local area. That really would fit the bill for ‘here comes the sun’.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
