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The government has published the first draft of its Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, planned legislation that will bring academies in line with maintained schools in some areas where they have previously had freedom.

Labour has claimed that its stance on school structures is “agnostic”.

But Sam Freedman, senior fellow at the Institute for Government and senior adviser to the education charity Ark, says the bill shows that the government is not “agnostic” on academies. “If you’re taking away power [from academies], then you must think it’s wrong for them to have those powers,” he tells Tes.

However, Jon Andrews, the Education Policy Institute’s head of analysis and director for school system and performance, says the bill is “relatively measured”, adding: “I wouldn’t frame it as an anti-academies thing.”

For academy trusts, it’s the details that count. Tes has rounded up the academy freedoms that the bill will impact, and how.

Freedoms that academies will lose

1. Curriculum

Once the review of curriculum and assessment has published its recommendations in autumn 2025 and a revised curriculum has been developed, academies will be required to follow this, just as maintained schools will be.

Andrews says “we’re not going to know quite what that means until the curriculum and assessment review has concluded”.

David Thomas, CEO of Axiom Maths and a former Department for Education adviser, tells Tes he doesn’t see “what problem this [change] is solving”.

“I haven’t seen an argument anywhere that says the curriculum in academies is problematic because it’s not exactly following the national curriculum,” he says, querying why the DfE has made such a change.

However, Andrews says this is “less of a big change than it looks” because “academies are [already] constrained just the same as other schools are by the accountability system” that includes end of key stage tests, GCSEs and so on - so in practice, it may not lead to significant change anyway.

2. Admissions

New duties will be introduced for all mainstream state schools, including academies, to cooperate with local authorities on admissions and place planning.

Greater powers for councils will also mean they can direct academies to admit children. Academies will be able to appeal to the schools adjudicator when they disagree with a decision.

Furthermore, currently the admissions authority for a school sets its published admission number (PAN). For academies, the admissions authority is the trust.

Trusts will retain control over their admissions and will still set the PAN for their schools. However, a new measure in the bill will give the schools adjudicator the authority to set the PAN of any school for up to two years where they have upheld an objection about the school’s PAN.

• Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: All you need to know
• Sam Freedman: Why Labour’s ‘agnostic’ approach to school structures is doomed to fail
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Andrews thinks this is a positive move, especially given the drop in pupil rolls.

Currently an academy in an area with falling pupil rolls that keeps its PAN the same is “going to make other schools vulnerable, because their funding is related to numbers”, Andrews says. The “burden will therefore fall on maintained schools to reduce their numbers and potentially close”.

The measures in the bill mean that academies will have to work with local authorities, which Andrews describes as “positive cooperation” that will lead to a better picture for local areas rather than individual schools.

Arooj Shah, chair of the Local Government Association’s (LGA) children and young people board, is in agreement, saying it is “good” that “councils will have greater powers to direct school admissions, and failing council-maintained schools will not automatically become academies” - both policies the LGA has long called for.

Echoing this sentiment is Heather Sandy, of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, who says the new admissions measures are “aimed at empowering local authorities to improve inclusion”.

3. Unqualified teachers

The requirement to employ teachers who have Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) or are working towards it and for teachers to complete a statutory induction will also be extended to academies. This new requirement will come into effect from 1 September 2026.

Sir David Carter, a former national schools commissioner, says he agrees with the need for qualified teachers. “However, we’ve seen more and more trusts using a broader workforce who provide tuition such as sports coaching or dance lessons and cookery classes” - and these teachers might not have QTS.

“There is a whole army of people who support these things who don’t have QTS, and we need to be careful about the unintended consequences of a sweeping policy like this,” Sir David says.

Thomas agrees, questioning the purpose of this new measure and saying he has “not seen any evidence that says that the use of unqualified teachers is a detriment to children’s education in the system”.

“I can’t join the dots between the policy and the real-world outcome that is being made better by it,” he says.

4. Immunity from certain orders

The bill also creates a new power for the education secretary over academy trusts. Currently the education secretary has no intervention mechanism to ensure that trusts comply with their legal duties other than to issue a termination warning notice.

Under the new power, the education secretary will be able to issue directions to academy trusts deemed not to be complying with legal duties or that are “acting or proposing to act unreasonably”.

A trust may be issued with a direction if its school uniform policy does not comply with new requirements, or if it has “failed to deal with a parental complaint”.

Academies will also be brought on to the same statutory footing as maintained schools for off-site directions - the system whereby pupils are temporarily sent to other locations to improve their behaviour. The DfE says this is not intended to change current practice for academies..

It will mean that academies must adhere to the same statutory safeguards as maintained schools for off-site directions. Academies will have to notify local authorities if a pupil directed off-site to improve their behaviour has an education, health and care plan.

Jonathan Simons, partner and head of the education practice at Public First, says the education secretary’s new power is “almost certainly not going to be used very often”. These measures give the secretary of state a “backstop power...to get trusts and schools to do the things most would be doing anyway”.

Freedoms that will go to consultation

1. Teacher pay and conditions

Academies are currently free to set their own terms and conditions for staff.

One of the big changes in the bill will extend the statutory teacher pay and conditions framework to include academy teachers. Academies will also be required to follow guidance concerning the implementation of pay orders.

Currently academy trusts have the freedom to set their own pay. In a Tes investigation earlier this year, 12 trusts - out of 625 that responded - said they exceeded the national pay scale, while a further 21 differentiated on smaller points of the deal or provided staff with additional benefits.

The DfE says no teacher will see their pay cut, but has declined to confirm that trusts will be able to continue offering enhanced pay and conditions to new staff.

The government will ask the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) to make recommendations on changes to the national framework before it is applied and consider “additional flexibilities” that can be included.

The academies sector will be able to make representations on this during a consultation period. Changes will not be brought in before September 2026.

Sir David says that while he does not know of any trusts that pay teachers less than the national pay scale, “a number of trusts do pay their teachers more and it feels like a race to the bottom if that can no longer continue until maintained schools can pay at the same level, a move that could take several years”.

What’s more, Andrews says that given the teacher recruitment and retention crisis, schools should have the flexibility to pay teachers at the rate needed to attract them, particularly in shortage subjects. “That gets down to very local issues about the labour market, so trusts may be better placed than the national pay scales to know where those extra payments are needed.”

Simons says he believes the DfE “is trying to say that all schools should have flexibility over pay and working conditions”. But it “got itself in a muddle over-explaining this”, which has led to concerns among trust CEOs about teacher pay and conditions being eroded.

Flexibilities such as a nine-day fortnight “seem eminently sensible innovations”, Simons says, adding that during a recruitment and retention crisis, “I don’t understand why we would in any way want to restrict those.”

Freedoms that academies will retain

1. Admissions

Despite some of the changes to admissions already outlined, academy trusts will in general retain control over their own admissions.

This is what Freedman says left him “most surprised” about the bill. The government could have “allowed local authorities to revoke academies’ rights to be their own admissions authority if they think it’s being used unfairly” - but it hasn’t.

This makes the combination of measures in the bill “odd”, Freedman adds: “It’s very hard for me to see how academies having curriculum freedom harms the rest of the system. But the admissions freedom could potentially harm other schools.”

2. Executive pay

While teacher pay is up for consultation, the bill makes no mention of the contentious issue of trust executive pay. So trusts remain free to set that as they wish.

‘There’s nothing else left’

Other than admissions and executive pay, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill leaves academies with “very little freedom...beyond what other schools have”, Freedman says. “There’s nothing else left.”

Leora Cruddas, chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, tells Tes there is “a risk that the loss of freedoms makes it more difficult for trusts to do the hard work of improving schools in the most challenging circumstances”.

Cruddas also notes that “school trusts have lived up to the original mission of the previous Labour government to make a difference to the education of children, particularly in the most disadvantaged areas”.

However, Andrew O’Neill, headteacher of All Saints Catholic College in West London, says these measures should be viewed “not through a lens of what has been lost but, rather, what has been added and gained as a whole”.

“Some of the supposed losses of freedoms were things that made the system unfair for many schools and, subsequently, put children at a disadvantage,” he adds.

Simons says that, looking optimistically, he sees “a government that is taking back a lot of powers but, in practice, not much will change”.

He adds that if the draft bill is finalised, “we will end up with a sector that is much more homogenous”.

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