13th of October 2025
What is in the new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill?
The new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, sponsored by the Department for Education (DfE), will introduce a number of changes to the education landscape, with an impact on tutors and tuition businesses. One area of change is in relation to children who are removed from school to be home educated.
The Bill introduces a new “provider duty” on certain out-of-school education providers to supply information to local authorities (LAs) for Children Not in School (CNIS) registers where a provider delivers more than a set proportion of a child’s education and the parent is not actively involved in supervision, when issued with a request from a local authority. The exact threshold will be set by regulations after consultation. Providers in scope must give children’s names, dates of birth and addresses, and the time each child spends at the provision (including the time without active parental supervision). LAs may levy monetary penalties (amount to be set in regulations) for non-compliance, after an initial grace period. Record-keeping sufficient to evidence time on programme will therefore become essential.
Many of the requirements will be set out in secondary legislation (regulations) after the Bill is passed. It may not come into force until 2027/28.
What is the “Provider Duty”?
As TTA understands it, the Provider Duty has two main purposes:
- To check that children not in school receive an appropriate education.
- Proposal: TTA strongly supports this. However, we would want to go further in ensuring that tuition providers comply with our standards around holding an Enhanced DBS check and having appropriate safeguarding experience/training.
- To try to find other parents of children non in school who have not registered with the local authority
- Proposal: TTA strongly opposes this; tuition providers are not appropriate enforcement agents. Local authorities can easily access records of children deregistered from school or check birth records (from the NHS) against records of children in school in order to verify which children are not registered that should be.
Who is Subject to the Provider Duty?
The DfE has proposed that only providers above a certain threshold (to be set out in regulations after a consultation) will be subject to the provider duty. It was suggested that this threshold might be the number of hours of provision per week.
TTA is concerned about this because:
- Employment Agencies (many tuition businesses) technically do not supply any tuition – so they could supply any number of tutors and have no obligation at all, whilst any tuition businesses operating as an Employment Business will almost certainly exceed the threshold.
- It is unclear what will happen where the hours per week fluctuate (if the threshold is based on hours per week).
- Tutors/tuition businesses providing less tuition may be a source of more concern than those providing more tuition.
TTA proposes to suggest to the DfE that all academic education providers are subject to the provider duty. This would be fairer and simpler and would avoid confusion around whether a tutor was or was not subject to the provider duty. The requirement itself is likely to be reasonably straightforward and TTA will respond to the expected consultation to ensure that the obligations demanded of providers are sensible.
What Next?
Please fill out TTA’s snap survey here; we will run this survey until Monday the 27th of October at 8am and then provide anonymised results to the DfE.