Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026

A headline education measure is the requirement for state‑funded primary schools to offer free breakfast clubs, helping ensure children are fed, settled and ready to learn at the start of the school day. This move has both wellbeing and attainment objectives and will require governing bodies and academy trusts to consider:

• staffing and supervision arrangements
• safeguarding and dietary controls
• funding flows and value‑for‑money oversight

For many trusts, this represents a meaningful extension of the school day and an area where clear policies and financial controls will be essential.

The Act requires all schools to limit the number of branded uniform items to a maximum of three (excluding ties) for each pupil’s required uniform list – effective from September 2026. This aims to reduce the cost of compulsory uniform purchases and promote fairness.

Academy trusts will need to review:

• uniform policies
• supplier arrangements
• compliance across academies within the group

An estimated 500,000 additional children will become eligible for free school meals in England. This expansion is expected to save many families money on daily school lunch costs. It delivers on a promise to reduce the cost of living for families with children. These new entitlements are planned to take effect from the 2026–27 school year, ensuring many more disadvantaged pupils receive a nutritious midday meal.

The Act establishes a new statutory duty for agencies to share information about a child’s safety and welfare with each other. This addresses long-standing gaps in communication that have been highlighted by tragic cases where children at risk “fell through the cracks.” The Act also gives the Secretary of State authority to introduce a Single Unique Identifier for every child to track children across education, health, and social care systems. This unique ID (currently being piloted) will ensure children are always visible to local services and not lost to oversight, facilitating early intervention if a child is at risk.

Local safeguarding arrangements are reinforced through multi-agency child protection teams (MACPTs) in each English local authority area (enacted via Part 1 of the Act). These teams bring together professionals from police, social services, health, and education to jointly assess and respond to serious child protection cases. This formalises best practices to ensure earlier intervention and specialist expertise in child protection is consistently applied across the country. The goal is to improve joint decision-making and prevent children at risk from being overlooked due to siloed working by different agencies.

Local authorities in England are now required to maintain registers of children not attending school (e.g. home-educated). This new duty means every child in a community must be accounted for in terms of receiving a suitable education. The registers will improve oversight of home-educated and other children outside formal schooling, helping authorities ensure each child’s education and welfare needs are met. This move follows prior proposals and debate in recent years and aims to protect children like those in high-profile cases who were withdrawn from school despite active safeguarding concerns. It will require enhanced engagement with families who home-educate, balancing children’s right to education with parental freedoms.

Responding to concerns about unsafe, unregulated placements for children, Ofsted gains new powers to take enforcement action against substandard or illegal providers. The Act empowers Ofsted to levy monetary penalties on unregistered children’s homes and extends regulatory oversight to “establishments and agencies” previously unregulated.

The Act explicitly addresses children’s digital safety and wellbeing, reflecting growing concerns about the impact of technology. All schools in England will be required to adhere to government guidance on restricting mobile phone use during the school day, establishing a consistent national approach to eliminate the distraction and risks of phones in schools. The core expectation is all schools should be mobile phone-free environments by default, of which many already are.

Additionally, the Act creates a new enabling power for government to swiftly implement further protections based on the ongoing Children’s Digital Wellbeing review (e.g. potential future regulations around children’s use of social media or smartphones). These provisions signal a proactive stance on emerging online risks and reinforce school environments that support child wellbeing and concentration.

The Act enhances statutory support for children in care and those leaving care, including:

• improved entitlements and pathways into education and employment
• clearer expectations on public bodies to work together
• formal recognition of kinship carers in law
• importance of sibling relationships for children in care

Schools play a critical role in this ecosystem, particularly through designated teachers, virtual school heads and pastoral support structures.

For the first time, multi-academy trusts will be subject to their own dedicated Ofsted inspections. Previously, Ofsted inspected individual schools but not the overall performance and governance of MAT; the Act closes that gap.

Furthermore, academy trusts in England are now required to follow the national curriculum and abide by national teacher pay and conditions frameworks. This rolls back some of the autonomy academies have had since 2010 by bringing them in line with maintained (local authority) schools on key standards and staffing requirements. Crucially, all academies must now employ qualified teachers (with limited exceptions) and are subject to statutory teacher pay scales and standard conditions. These measures aim to drive up teaching quality and ensure equitable standards in curriculum and teacher quality across all state-funded schools.

The Act introduces a new statutory framework for school admissions and place planning to ensure that the right school places are available in the right areas. Local authorities and schools must now cooperate more closely in setting admissions arrangements each year.

Local authorities can direct academy schools to admit individual children (for example, to place vulnerable or excluded pupils), a power that has been extended to cover academies via the Act.

In addition to the new MAT inspections noted above, the Act reinforces Ofsted’s role in driving improvement. Through dedicated inspection of academy trusts’ performance and governance, and by strengthening the requirements on all schools (maintained and academies alike), the Act ensures uniform accountability measures. This complements other reforms such as scrapping the “coasting school” forced-academisation rule – the Act removes the previous legal obligation (from the Education and Adoption Act 2016) to convert underperforming maintained schools into academies. Instead, more emphasis is placed on collaborative improvement and proportionate intervention.

To preserve high standards of teaching and pupil safety, the Act fills gaps in the teacher misconduct regulatory regime. It broadens the scope of teacher misconduct investigations and potential bans to include educators in settings that were previously exempt, such as further education colleges, and ensures that teachers can be investigated for serious misconduct regardless of their employment status at the time of the incident. This prevents individuals who commit misconduct from evading accountability by moving to different educational roles or leaving the profession temporarily. By aligning teacher regulation across sectors, the Act aims to maintain professional standards and trust in educators nationwide.