The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act is law. Two sections in it change what a tutoring organisation is.

I'll be honest with you: I nearly missed this one myself.

When the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill finally received Royal Assent on 29 April, the coverage went exactly where you'd expect. Free breakfast clubs. Branded uniform items. Academies and the national curriculum. All perfectly good things to write about, all completely irrelevant to anyone running a tuition business.

So the sector skimmed it, filed it under "schools stuff", and moved on.

Then I actually sat down with Part 2 one evening, and about forty minutes in I put my cup of tea down. Because there are two sections in this Act that change what a tutoring organisation is in the eyes of the law, and I've barely heard either of them mentioned at a conference, in a Facebook group, or on a podcast.

Let me take them one at a time.

The Provider Duty: a notice, fifteen days, and a fine

Most of Part 2's "children not in school" material is about local authority registers. Councils have to maintain a register of children of compulsory school age in their area who aren't on a school roll, or who are on a roll but educated elsewhere for some or all of the time. Home education, mostly, but also alternative provision, EOTAS packages, and the long tail of children who are technically registered somewhere and are actually being taught by you.

That's a council's problem, not yours. Except for what has to go in the register.

Under the new section 436C, where a provider other than a parent is educating a child for more than a prescribed amount of time, the register must hold that provider's name and address, the type of provider they are, the address of every place the education happens or, if it's delivered virtually, the provider's website or email address. And then two estimates of time. The total the child spends with that provider, and the amount of that time spent without any parent being actively involved in the tuition or supervision of the child.

Read that last field again, because it's the most revealing line in the whole Act. Somebody drafting this understood exactly what unsupervised one-to-one teaching is, and built a box for it.

Then comes section 436E, and this is the one the sector has christened the Provider Duty. Where a council reasonably believes a person is providing out-of-school education to a registered, or registrable, child beyond that threshold without a parent involved, it may serve a notice on that person. The notice can require you to confirm whether you provide such education to any child living in England or Wales, expressly including children who don't live in that council's area, and to hand over, for each of them, the child's name, date of birth and home address, the total hours you provide, and the hours you provide without a parent involved.

You get a minimum of fifteen days. If you don't comply, or you supply incorrect information, the council can require you to pay a monetary penalty under a new Schedule 31A. Late payment increases it by a prescribed percentage. You can appeal to the First-tier Tribunal on the grounds that the decision was based on an error of fact, was wrong in law, or was unreasonable. Unpaid, it's recoverable as though a county court had ordered it.

Now, one correction, because I've seen this misdescribed in three different places already. This is not a standing obligation to file your client list with the council every term. There's no portal, no annual return, no register of providers. The duty is triggered by a notice landing on your desk. No notice, no duty. That distinction matters enormously for how you plan, and getting it wrong will have people building compliance processes they don't need while missing the one they do.

The three-month problem

Here's the bit that should actually change what you do on Monday morning.

A notice under 436E can ask about children you are teaching now, or have taught at any time during the three months ending with the date of the notice.

Three months, backwards. And you cannot build a record backwards.

Ask yourself, honestly, whether you could produce for every relevant child, inside fifteen days: full name, date of birth, home address, total hours delivered, and hours delivered without a parent present or involved in supervision. Most agencies I talk to could get the first three out of a CRM in an afternoon. The hours are harder. And that final field, time taught without parental involvement, is not something anybody in this industry is recording today, because until this Act nobody had ever asked for it.

There is a small mercy built in. No penalty applies to a notice served in the first three months after section 38 comes into force. That's a genuine grace period and it's clearly deliberate, but it's three months, and it starts on a date the Secretary of State will choose. That’s not a lot of runway if you're starting from a spreadsheet.

And before anyone reaches for it: the Act also inserts a section 436T, which provides that a disclosure authorised or required under these provisions doesn't breach any obligation of confidence or other restriction on disclosure. So "we'd love to help but data protection prevents us" isn't going to be the answer. Which means the conversation you actually need to have is with your parents, in your privacy notice and your terms, before a notice ever arrives. Telling a family you've handed their child's home address to a council is a very different conversation when you warned them it might happen.

The bit nobody's talking about: online providers and teacher misconduct

Right. Section 52. This is the one I genuinely think the sector has missed, and it's the reason I wrote this piece rather than a LinkedIn post.

Section 52 amends the teacher misconduct regime in the Education Act 2002, the machinery behind prohibition orders, run by the Teaching Regulation Agency. Until now that regime has applied to teaching work in schools, sixth form colleges, children's homes and a short list of similar settings. Section 52 extends it to independent educational institutions that aren't schools, to further education, to special post-16 institutions, to independent training providers, and to a brand new category the Act has to define from scratch, because it didn't previously exist in law: the online education provider.

A new section 141AA sets four conditions, and an institution has to meet all of them. It must be a company registered under the Companies Act 2006 with its registered office in England, or a registered charity with an English address. It must provide education to at least one student living in England who is of compulsory school age, or over compulsory school age but under 19, or 19-plus with an EHC plan specifying full-time education. At least one of those students must receive all or the majority of their education from it. And it must be set up to deliver all or the majority of its education online.

Sit with that for a second and picture who it describes.

It isn't the family booking an hour of GCSE maths on a Tuesday evening. It isn't most tutoring agencies, and I want to be clear about that. But an online provider delivering full EOTAS packages to children who aren't in school, commissioned by councils, where your provision is that child's education? That's not a hypothetical. I know several. Some of them are growing very fast on exactly this work, and it's some of the most valuable, most necessary teaching happening in the country right now.

Two further details make it sharper. The regime now catches a person who is, or has at any time been, engaged in teaching work at such a setting, and a new subsection makes it irrelevant whether the misconduct happened while they were doing that teaching work or at some other time entirely. And the definition of "relevant employer", the one that carries the duty to notify the Secretary of State when you dismiss someone for misconduct or would have dismissed them had they not resigned first, now expressly covers a person who employs or engages someone to teach at an online education provider.

Engages. Not employs. In a sector that runs almost entirely on self-employed contractors, that single word does a lot of work.

There's a real irony here that I can't quite get over. I've written before that one of the great structural weaknesses of tutoring is that a DBS check doesn't connect to teacher misconduct records, and that a tutor can be prohibited from every classroom in England while still handing you a spotless certificate. Section 52 is the first time Parliament has pulled any part of the tutoring world across that line. Not far, and not for most of us. But the line has moved, and it moved while everyone was reading about uniforms.

It's law but it isn't switched on

Before anyone panics, or worse, buys something on the strength of a panic, none of the above is in force.

Section 78 handles commencement. Some provisions came into force on Royal Assent, some two months after. The children-not-in-school sections, 37 to 42, need commencement regulations, from Welsh Ministers for Wales and from the Secretary of State otherwise. Section 52 isn't in the two-month list either, so it's waiting on the same kind of decision.

What did come into force on 29 April is the power to make regulations. Which is the tell, really. The Government can start drafting the detail whenever it likes, and the detail is where this is decided, because two numbers currently don't exist:

The prescribed amount of time. If the threshold lands at fifteen hours a week, this Act is about full-time alternative provision, and most tutoring businesses will never see a notice. If it lands at two hours a week, a very large part of the sector is in scope overnight. Nobody knows yet, and that’s the real issue.

If you do one thing off the back of this article, it's this: watch for those regulations, and read them the week they appear rather than the month after.

The gap the Act doesn't close

I'll finish where the Act doesn't.

Registers, notices, fines, tribunal appeals. For all of that machinery, this legislation is built to answer exactly one question. Where are the children? It is a visibility Act. It tells a council which children aren't in school and who is teaching them.

It says almost nothing about whether the person teaching them should be anywhere near a child.

There's still no requirement for a tutoring provider to hold an Enhanced DBS. No registration scheme. No inspection regime for most of us. No minimum safeguarding training. A council will soon be able to fine you for not telling them a child's date of birth, while having no power whatsoever to ask what checks you ran on the adult sitting with that child for six hours a week.

The Tutors' Association has pushed back on the Provider Duty, and their January piece by Anne-Marie Firmin argues that tutors and education providers shouldn't be handed an enforcement role, and that the downsides would likely outweigh the benefits. It's a serious argument, made in good faith, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a soundbite, so I'm going to give it one of its own another day.

But there's a second half to what they said that I'd sign tomorrow: that if we're going to have a register at all, it should come with assurance that tuition providers actually meet standards on Enhanced DBS checks and safeguarding training. On that, they're completely right. We are about to become countable without becoming accountable, and I'm not sure that's the trade any of us would have chosen.

So here's where I've landed, and you can tell me I'm wrong.

The organisations that will find this Act painful are the ones for whom "who are we teaching, for how long, and who checked them" is a question that takes three weeks and four inboxes to answer. The ones that'll barely notice are the ones who already know. That's the same divide I keep writing about when councils go out to tender, and the same one that decides who wins the work. This Act didn't create it. It just put a fifteen-day deadline and a fine on the wrong side of it.

It's the whole reason we built TotalOnboarder the way we did: so that the answer to "who, for how long, and checked by whom" is a screen, not a scramble.

Fifteen days sounds like plenty, right up until the letter's in your hand.