🏫 Navigating the New Schools Bill: What 2025’s Reforms Mean for Schools and Pupils

Education entered a new chapter in 2025. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was introduced to set the tone for a more consistent, transparent, and future-ready system. The reform includes 39 proposed policies, which aim to strengthen school and staffing structures, boost safeguarding, and to ensure all pupils (regardless of setting or background) have access to high quality education and care.

Here’s a closer look at the headlines, and what they mean for your school community:

• Qualified Teacher Status (QTS): All new teachers in academies must hold or be working toward QTS, with statutory induction requirements starting September 2026.
• National Curriculum Compliance: Academies will be legally required to follow the national curriculum once the review concludes.
• Teacher Pay and Conditions: Academies must adopt the national teacher pay and conditions framework.
• Admissions and Oversight: Councils gain more power to direct admissions and influence school place planning.
• Breakfast Clubs: All state-funded schools must offer free breakfast clubs for Reception to Year 6 pupils, with trials starting April 2025.

🛡️ Safeguarding Guidance: KCSIE 2025

The updated Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) guidance includes:

• Online Safety Risks: Expanded to cover misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.
• AI and Recruitment: New guidance on pre-recruitment online checks and generative AI use.
• Attendance and Alternative Provision: Stronger emphasis on safeguarding pupils in alternative settings and those absent from education.

📚 Curriculum and SEND Reform

• SEND National Standards Framework: Aims to standardise support across schools and local authorities.
• EHCP Digitisation: Streamlined processes for Education, Health and Care Plans, though implementation varies.
• Climate and Digital Literacy: Curriculum reforms now embed sustainability and coding/AI ethics into KS3 and KS4.

🤖 Technology and AI Integration

• AI in Education Framework: Major tech firms have agreed to safety standards for AI tools used in classrooms.
• Assistive Tech for SEND: All new teachers will be trained in using assistive technology to support SEND learners.
• DfE’s EdTech Strategy: Includes a new service to help schools plan and purchase tech more effectively.

Find out more information here: https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/12/the-childrens-wellbeing-bill-what-parents-need-to-know/

The New Schools Bill represents a major shift in how schools will need to plan, operate, and support both staff and pupils. Schools will need to re-evaluate their staffing structures, align teaching qualifications more closely with national expectations, and adjust budget planning to meet standardised pay frameworks.

With greater oversight from local authorities and required provision such as free breakfast clubs, schools face added pressures to coordinate resources and respond to community needs with agility. The reforms also demand increased safeguarding vigilance, new training around digital risks and AI, and better consistency in SEND support. In essence, this bill moves schools toward a more unified and accountable education system—requiring strategic updates across operations, staffing, curriculum, and wellbeing.

As these reforms roll out, transparency and community-first thinking have never mattered more. Our next series of blogs over the summer will be sharing weekly insights school leaders understand the changes, and how they’ll shape everything from staff planning to wellbeing.

Schools Mutual Services shares a commitment to fairness, to community, and to doing things right. Choosing SMS as a partner frees up school leaders to focus on compliance to the New Schools Bill, while assisting schools to offer competitive supply teaching rates, and ensuring budgets are protected as much as possible, and used fully to support education… as opposed to profits making their way into shareholder pockets.

If your school hasn’t yet had the conversation with SMS, now’s the time.

You can contact us here ➡️CONTACT FORM

With regional offices in Newcastle, Oxford, and Nottingham, SMS works with schools across the whole of the North East, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicester, Oxfordshire and Swindon. Each office is embedded within its local education community, working in partnership with school trusts, teaching alliances such as OTSA, and local authorities to deliver tailored supply staffing support across primary and secondary education, whether that is day-to-day supply teaching or long-term placements. From multi academy trusts to community primary and special schools, SMS is helping educational establishments navigate financial pressures with a smarter, more sustainable solution for supply teachers and support staff, that puts pupil outcomes first.

North East Hub

Portland House, Newcastle, NE1 8AL
📞 0191 933 8300
✉️ info@schoolsmutualservices.co.uk

South East Hub

Podium Sandford Gate, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 6LB
📞 01865 597 771
✉️ oxford@schoolsmutualservices.co.uk

East Midlands Hub

Read the Next Blogs in this Series:

Wellbeing in Schools – From Breakfast to Emotional Support

Relationships, Safety, and Trust in Schools – A New Era for RSHE

SEND Reform – Clarity, Consistency, and Better Access for Every Learner

KCSIE Digital Safeguarding in 2025 – Tackling Misinformation and AI Risks