ISC Daily News Summary

During a debate in the House of Commons on the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which discussed the regulation of independent schools, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Department for Education Stephen Morgan noted: "Clause 31 will make several changes to the regulatory regime for private schools found in the 2008 Act. The clause has a number of distinct parts, including a new power of suspension." Mr Morgan added: "These measures make many improvements to the existing system of private school registration and regulation." Ministers continued to engage in an extended debate on changes to the regulation system, the full transcript of which can be found on Hansard.

A three-year time limit for child sexual abuse victims to sue for damages is to be removed in England and Wales under "long overdue" government reforms, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has announced. The MoJ said laws would also be refined to encourage employers to apologise for the actions of present or former employees, so victims would be more likely to receive apologies from institutions such as schools or hospitals. Ministers said they were delivering on recommendations laid out in the 2022 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which was led by Professor Alexis Jay. By Ruth Comerford, BBC News. 

Banning phones in schools is not connected to pupils achieving higher grades or having better mental wellbeing, according to a study by academics at the University of Birmingham. Issues such as pupils' sleep and classroom behaviour were also found to be no different for schools with phone bans and those without. The researchers did, however, link spending more time on smartphones and social media to poorer outcomes across all measures. Dr Victoria Goodyear, lead author of the study, told BBC News the findings were not "against" smartphone bans in schools, but "what we're suggesting is that those bans in isolation are not enough to tackle the negative impacts". By Alice Evans.

Ofsted's new five-point grading system for school inspections, set to replace single-word judgements later this year, has raised concerns about the reliability of evaluations. Education experts, including former government adviser Sam Freedman, have said the increased number of "sub-judgements" could lead to inconsistencies, potentially undermining the inspectorate's credibility. Mr Freedman warned: "Because you don’t have the overarching grade anymore, you’ve lost the thing that gives you reliability at a higher level." By Connie Dimsdale, iNews.

In an article for Tes, trust leader Warren Carratt warns that increasing mainstream inclusion for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) must not come at the expense of underfunding specialist schools. Highlighting that "almost half of the high-needs overspend is accounted for by placements in the independent sector", Mr Carratt says: "While, yes, we need a more consistently inclusive mainstream offer across our school system, that cannot come at the expense of having a fairly funded and adequately resourced specialist sector. One does not - and cannot - negate the need for the other." Warren Carratt is CEO of Nexus Multi-Academy Trust.