The purpose of the Bill is to: promote excellence in schools and help ensure that every school becomes a good school; ensure a customer-driven skills and apprenticeship system; and create a new regulator for qualifications and tests and a development agency for curriculum, assessment and qualifications.

The main elements of the Bill are:

• Promote excellence in schools and fair access to good schools through taking appropriate powers and making sure local authorities intervene when necessary to ensure that all schools achieve at least 30% 5 GCSEs at A* - C grade, including English and Maths; strengthening the powers that parents have to ensure that their children receive high standard, personalised education and ensuring parents’ complaints are handled in a straightforward and open way; improving behaviour and attendance and reform of the Pupil Referral Units and other alternative provision outside mainstream schools and strengthening of local partnerships;

• Transfer funding and responsibility for delivering 16-18 education and training to local authorities; and create a new non-departmental public body to perform certain functions on pre-19 education and skills (Young People’s Learning Agency);

• Transfer responsibility for the education and training of young offenders in juvenile custody to local authorities;

•  Strengthen the capacity of Children’s Trusts to improve outcomes for children, young people and their families, in particular to make arrangements for early identification and support for children with additional needs;

• Strengthen qualifications regulation powers, and to transfer those powers from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) to a new independent regulator for England, the Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator (Ofqual); and to establish a Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency to continue QCA’s remaining functions;

• Provide a statutory basis for the apprenticeship programme, creating a new National Apprenticeships Service, establishing the first statutory entitlement to Apprenticeships for all suitably qualified young people, and ensuring that careers teachers and advisors provide comprehensive information about Apprenticeships.

• Secure a demand-led adult skills system, driven by learners and employers; a new adult advancement and careers service will be housed within a new post-19 Skills Funding Agency.

• Strengthen workplace skills training workplace skills training, including by creating a right for employees to request from their employer time to undertake relevant training;
• Secure contributions from employers towards English language provision for employees who are speakers of other languages;

• Amend the rules about the effect of personal insolvency for those with student loans, ensuring consistency of treatment for

• A document on the National Secondary Challenge will be published in the summer, and will include proposals to help create greater excellence in Schools.

• A White Paper on reform of Pupil Referral Units, including consideration of new school structures such as Studio Schools, will be published in the summer;

• The Government has launched a consultation on its proposals for the reform of responsibility and funding for post-16 education and skills training and the education of young offenders, Raising Expectations: enabling the system to deliver. You can comment on these proposals at the Department for Children, Schools and Families website.This consultation closes on 9 June;

• The Government will be shortly be consulting on the right to request time to train and the requirement for employers to contribute to English language training; details of the consultation will be published on www.dius.gov.uk. 

• A consultation on reform of the QCA, Confidence in Standards: Regulating and developing qualifications and assessment, closed on 10 March. The Government will publish its response to this consultation by mid-June;

• The Government’s consultation on apprenticeships, World Class Apprenticeships, closed on 31 March, but draft clauses on apprenticeships will be published for consultation this summer;

• The Government does not plan a formal consultation on the proposed changes to student loans but will consult with stakeholders such as the credit and debt counselling industries.

• The Government is consulting on statutory guidance on Children’s Trusts (end 26 May). Views were also invited through a Written Ministerial Statement on 3 April, on whether further changes, including to the legislative framework, were needed. Options for further consultation are under consideration.

• The Education and Skills Bill currently being considered by Parliament would raise the participation age to 18 by 2015 in England only;

• A Youth Crime Action Plan to be published this summer and a green paper on improving the services that sentenced young people receive will include further proposals to improve education for young offenders;

• Within current legislative powers, the Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator was launched in April as the interim regulator, taking on the QCA’s regulatory role. The Education and Skills Bill currently before Parliament contains provisions enabling the regulator to recognise organisations offering qualifications, not just individual qualifications (as at present). This is in line with proposals in the December consultation document.