ASCL's ten asks for education 

A key demand of ASCL and other organisations was the removal of the two-child limit on benefits which was widely recognised as the biggest single driver of child poverty. The two-child limit was removed in April 2026, and it is estimated that this action will lift 450,000 children out of poverty within this parliament. The government also agreed to another key demand to extend free school meals to all children in receipt of Universal Credit from September 2026. Both these measures are among the actions outlined in the government’s wider child poverty strategy which it estimates will together lift 550,000 children out of relative low income by the end of this parliament. However, the total number of children living in poverty (in the year April 2024 to March 2025) stood at around four million, and there is clearly more work that needs to be done.

In February 2026, the DfE published a white paper, ‘Every child achieving and thriving’, setting out major reforms to the system of support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities in England. The white paper proposes shifting the emphasis of SEND support towards greater inclusion in mainstream settings and introducing a new tiered approach to support. This will be supported by additional funding which includes a £1.6bn inclusive mainstream fund and a £1.8bn ‘experts at hand’ service to provide schools with specialist support. ASCL welcomes the proposals but continues to emphasise the importance of adequate funding and getting right the detail of delivering the reforms.
 

Education funding remains extremely challenging with many schools and colleges having to make cuts. The government’s decision to ask schools to make further savings to afford the cost of the teachers’ pay award in 2025 and 2026 has put further pressure on budgets and is likely to result in more restructures, job losses, and reductions in educational provision. The 2025 spending review plans for core school funding look extremely tight, and ASCL is urging the government to use ‘savings’ from falling pupil rolls to improve funding rates. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said in its annual report in January that funding per student in colleges is still around 8% lower than in 2010-11 and around 20% lower in school sixth forms. 
 

The government is expanding community-based support by funding up to 1,000 ‘Best Start Family Hubs’ by the end of 2028. These are similar in conception to the Sure Start centres which were largely dismantled as a result of cuts in the early 2010s under the government of the time. They will provide families with services such as early language support, debt and welfare advice, domestic abuse support, housing support, parenting support and mental health services. ASCL welcomes this initiative, but it remains to be seen whether this network will have the coverage and level of investment that is required by communities.

Recruitment to postgraduate initial teacher training improved in 2025-26 with targets for primary education exceeded, and 88% of the secondary education target achieved. While this is a significant improvement on recent years, it remains the case that the secondary target has still not been met since 2012/13 (except during the pandemic in 2020/21). 
 
Labour pledged in its 2024 General Election manifesto to recruit 6,500 additional teachers – a target which is arbitrary and has been further undermined by the decision to exclude primary teachers and to measure progress against 2023, a year before the present government came to power. In reality, the number of schoolteachers actually decreased in 2025 year-on-year and while this is in the context of falling rolls the pressures on recruitment and retention remain intense. 
 

In early 2025, a report by the National Audit Office showed a £13.8 billion backlog in school maintenance. The government spending review in June 2025 included a commitment to increase annual maintenance investment per year in line with inflation, and around £2.4 billion per year for the school rebuilding programme over the next four years. The rebuilding programme will be expanded to include a further 250 schools in addition to the 518 already selected for rebuilding.

While this investment is welcome, ASCL doubts that it will be sufficient to address the substantial historic backlog of repairs and maintenance across the school estate. In February 2026, the government published its 10-year education estates strategy. We welcome these plans and in particular the proposal to replace by autumn 2028 the condition improvement fund under which many schools and colleges are currently reliant on a cumbersome and inadequate annual bidding process to fund the cost of vital works.

Future investment must also consider the inadequacy of much of the school estate to cope with extreme heat, which is likely to become increasingly common.
 

Every year about a third of children do not achieve at least a Grade 4 in GCSE English and maths, impacting on their life chances and condemning them to a grinding cycle of mandatory resits in post-16 education. The Curriculum and Assessment Review was published in November 2025 and contained a number of welcome recommendations. However, ASCL remains concerned that it did not go far enough in finding solutions which improve the fortunes of the forgotten third. A new ‘stepping stone’ qualification is planned for some 16-19 learners, but this is unlikely to significantly improve resit outcomes or the life chances for these young people.

The government has accepted a central argument of the Protect Student Choice campaign that there should be a vocational qualification pathway for 16-19 learners alongside A levels and T levels, and is planning to introduce V levels, with the first subjects (accounting and finance, digital systems and data, and education) taught in 2027. V levels will replace existing applied general qualifications (such as BTECs) which the government agreed to extend to avoid a gap in the qualifications landscape. We will argue for providers to be given freedom to mix V levels in a way that best suits the needs of their students and for the government to avoid implementing any rules of combination which restrict student choice.

ASCL is increasingly concerned about the inspection system implemented in autumn 2025. Far from being better for leader welfare than the previous system, the signs are that it may actually be worse. We are worried about the detrimental impact on the health and wellbeing of leaders, the potential for this to drive people out of the profession, and the risk of another tragedy. In addition, the evidence suggests that the new inspection system penalises schools serving the most disadvantaged communities, and we are not convinced that Ofsted’s plans to strengthen how a school’s context is taken into account will significantly improve matters. The impact of the new system should be urgently reviewed.

We have welcomed the efforts of the government to strike a positive note and work in partnership with the profession. However, this partnership can become strained when the government makes increasing demands of schools and colleges, without considering workload and wellbeing. Further, we believe that more work is needed on building a new ‘social contract’ between parents and schools to facilitate a supportive relationship and together address issues over behaviour, attendance and complaints.