With the post-holiday cobwebs brushed off, all eyes are on how the first full year of the Labour Government will unfold. So, what does 2025 have in store for the education sector?
Early Years and childcare
As part of the Government’s ‘reset’, it has said it wants to ensure more children are “school-ready” by the age of 5, with a target increase from 67.7 per cent to 75 per cent, meaning an ambition for an additional 40,000-45,000 children a year to reach their developmental goals.
To support this the Government will roll out government-funded childcare support to improve access, delivering the expansion of 30 funded hours and supporting 3,000 new and expanded school-based nurseries. The Education Secretary has said that by September 2025 the first 300 new primary-based nurseries will be open, with funding being allocated in “Spring”.
The Government has also said it will also increase “partnerships” with the sector to reform training and support for the workforce to improve standards. What this looks like, and who, is still to be confirmed.
Finally, the Government will also strengthen and join up family services by continuing the previous government’s Family Hubs and Start for Life programmes, parenting and home learning programmes, and strengthening both health visiting services for all families and improved early identification of special educational needs or disabilities (SEND). This investment would seem to be the Government’s chosen vehicle for its ambition to move back towards its Sure Start Centres ambition.
Schools
The first piece of education-related legislation brought forward in this Parliament is the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
As noted in our Head of Education Tiffany Beck’s recent deep dive into Labour’s approach to school policy, three legislative changes in the new bill will impact all schools, but particularly the academy sector.
These changes are:
- All new teachers will need to hold Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) or be working towards it.
Whilst the numbers of non-QTS teachers are very small (just 3.6 per cent of all teachers), there are a variety of reasons why a non-QTS teacher is a good thing. For example, academies currently appoint people such as artists, musicians and sports professionals, who are experts in their fields but don’t hold QTS, so the children get the best possible learning opportunity.
In a recruitment and retention crisis, and when we still await detail on how the Government will recruit its long-promised 6,500 new teachers, it would seem wise to keep as many recruitment options open as possible.
- All teachers will have the same core pay and conditions offer.
At the moment, academies don’t have to follow the same pay and conditions requirements as maintained schools, though most do. Trusts currently have the flexibility to do things differently in order to address the persistent national workforce crisis – you can’t improve schools without the staff to make it happen. A great example is United Learning, which pays its teachers 5.6 per cent above scale. Innovations like this need nurturing, not restricting.
- “Failing” schools will not have to become academies.
Currently, if a maintained school is rated ‘Inadequate’ by Ofsted, the Secretary of State must convert it into an academy and it joins a trust with the capacity and track record that indicates it can improve it rapidly. The Government’s plan changes this duty to a discretionary power, which means many struggling schools may not join the organisations which are best placed to turn them around, or may convert to academy status slowly.
But urgent intervention, from expert academy trusts, is what is required, which is why weak schools are currently “forced” to join a trust.
The rationale for all this is to “smooth the differences” between academies and local authority maintained schools.
But, as Tiff noted in her recent piece:
“More than half of children in England attend academies.
“The Government refers to Tony Blair’s former phrasing of “standards not structures”. But this mantra, as Sam Freedman expertly described in a recent Tes article, is “doomed to fail” – Blair himself described his change of heart, saying: “the whole point is that structures beget standards. How a service is configured affects outcomes.
“The key questions to ask are first, why does the trust structure drive improvements and innovations? Then, how does that improve education? And finally, how can we expand this opportunity? The answers to those are what should be driving policy.”
This bill is expected to take around 12 months to pass through parliament. During this time, the bill will be debated by MPs and Lords, with amendments put down by parliamentarians, impacting the shape and scope of the bill.
Further Education
Further Education was once again largely overlooked in the Autumn Budget, with Rachel Reeves announcing just £300m in funding for Further Education, for the financial year 2025 to 2026. David Hughes, Chief Executive, Association of Colleges, welcomed this investment but called on the Government to “set out an investment plan for the next three to five years.”
Indeed, potential industrial action by college teachers looms as the NASUWT teaching union has launched a ballot in a fight for a fair pay increase for sixth form college teachers for 2024/25. This will impact sixth form colleges in academies as well as in non-academies.
Fixing a fragmented system
In 2025, Skills England will take centre stage in transforming the UK’s skills system. As the successor to the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE), Skills England is being asked by the government to deliver a post-16 unified national strategy, identifying and addressing skills gaps to better align workforce capabilities with economic needs.
PLMR’s Senior Counsel John Cope says the success of Skills England is in everyone’s interests, but highlights the need for caution following the publication of the legislation. Concerns include the downgrade of the Chief Executive to a relatively junior civil servant, removal of the need to consult employers and the Secretary of State directly signing off apprenticeship standards.
The shift from the Apprenticeship Levy to the Growth and Skills Levy is set to redefine the apprenticeship system – but with the original proposal to make 50 per cent of Levy funds available to spend on non-apprenticeship disappearing to be replaced by an undefined ‘proportion’, just how redefining this reform will be is to be confirmed. One area that is set to become much less flexible is an end to Masters-level apprenticeships, and a squeeze on degree-level apprenticeships.
Resolving the higher education funding crisis
Despite there being no higher education bill in the King’s Speech, resolving the funding crisis in the sector remains one of the key challenges facing HE Minister, Baroness Smith. In November, it was announced that tuition fees would rise by 3.1 per cent – the first rise since 2017. This was welcomed by the sector, but remains a sticking plaster compared to the long-term financial pressure given the huge expansion of the HE sector in the last decade. It’s likely the government will return to this topic, especially and university mergers and acquisitions continue to become more common.
We should expect to see further engagement between the sector and government to work out a funding settlement that protects the sustainability of the sector.
Conclusion
The Government’s recent ‘reset’ reflects the tricky start to governing it has faced. Across the education sector, big reforms are being made as part of the Government’s “programme for renewal”. Despite communicating this is a long-term project, the Government will need to start seeing some positive results soon to improve the mood music.