Restraint and Seclusion in Schools: Child Safeguards To Finally Come Into Force

Patience is not so much a virtue but a necessity as a children’s human rights advocate. This week the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed legislation which, once it receives Royal Assent and is commenced, will require schools to inform parents within 24 hours of a child being subject to restraint or seclusion. Ministers will be required to issue national guidance on the use of restraint and seclusion in schools, and publish annual statistics collated from school data returns. They may also develop national standards for the provision of training on the use of restraint and seclusion in schools and maintain a list of standards produced by others. Known as ‘Calum’s Law’, the Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill has its origins in the discovery by Beth Morrison that her 11-year-old son, Calum, was being violently restrained by staff in his special school. That was 15½ years ago, in September 2010. An especially cruel regime saw Calum strapped to a chair with an egg timer placed in front of him. At the time, Calum had the language of a four-year-old, and no concept of time.

One of the spurs for Beth’s scrutiny of the school was Calum bringing home urine-soaked clothing when he had been out of nappies for years. A fuller picture of what Calum had gone through emerged only because of his parents’ persistent probing. Had they been sent an email or a letter each time Calum had been restrained or isolated from other pupils, as Calum’s Law will now require, Beth and her husband would have been able to take much earlier action to protect their son. Better still, this transparency over a matter of children’s fundamental human rights would have caused the school to stop, reflect and change its culture and practices long before having to drop letters into children’s school bags.

In the same month that Calum’s parents found out about his school’s restraint practices, new legal protections were due to commence for children attending schools and further education colleges in England. New section 93A of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, inserted through the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, applied to schools and was to come into effect on 1st September 2010. Schools were to be required to record each significant incident of use of force on a child and report this to parents or others holding parental responsibility, including a local authority where the child is looked after. That was until the protections fell victim to the incoming government’s wide-ranging campaign against what it deemed to be red tape. The charity I was then running – the Children’s Rights Alliance for England – discovered a statutory instrument had been laid which deleted the September 2010 commencement date. As I said at the time, “That the government has removed this basic safeguard for children without any explanation or public announcement is simply unacceptable”.

Children’s rights advocates shared with government case studies of highly vulnerable children who had been subject to dangerous restraint in school unbeknown to their parents or carers. We reminded parliamentarians of six-year-old Jade Chambers, a disabled child whose parents only found out she had been the subject of around 45 separate restraint incidents in a six-week period after they submitted a freedom of information request to her school. What happened to Jade had been one of the catalysts for the 2009 legislation, her family’s constituency MP Andrew Selous telling parliament: “The issue that I find totally unacceptable is that a child can be repeatedly physically restrained in a school without the parents knowing that it is happening”.

Ministers announced the duties would be commenced in September 2011, subject to a review led by Charlie Taylor, then the Department for Education’s expert adviser on behaviour. The review was undertaken during the 2011 school summer holidays without any consultation with children or parents. When I met Taylor, together with a policy colleague from the NSPCC, I stressed the particular vulnerabilities of very young children, non-verbal children and children in care who often move from home to home and may not have carers who know them well enough to detect their distress, as Calum’s mother was able to do. For children unable to understand or precisely communicate what has happened to them, information about potentially traumatic events at school is especially vital.

The review’s seven-page report (three of which were annexes) referenced the concerns of the ‘children’s rights lobby’, particularly in respect of vulnerable children, but concluded that the restraint reporting and recording duties were not “necessary either to keep children safe or to protect school staff”, warning that they “would add to the bureaucratic burden for some, but not all, schools”.

And so, we waited; periodically urging new intakes of civil servants and ministers to take action and buoyed by developments in Scotland and investigations and advocacy by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Scotland’s Children and Young People’s Commissioner. Having expected the section 93A school recording and reporting duties to finally commence in September 2025, the latest is that they will start on 1st April 2026, alongside revised (mostly non-statutory) guidance on the use of force in schools. Further, new secondary legislation – The Schools (Recording and Reporting of Seclusion and Restraint) (No. 2) (England) Regulations 2025 – also comes into force that day, extending recording and reporting duties to incidents of restraint and seclusion which fall outside school disciplinary penalties. If there is a significant incident involving the use of force, the section 93A recording and reporting duties apply, otherwise these regulations pertain.

Individual scenarios are specifically written into the secondary legislation as examples of treatment outside school disciplinary penalties where the recording and reporting duties apply, including the removal of children’s auxiliary aids which usually help them to move, (such as a wheelchair or walking frame), or fastening a child to a fixed or heavy object. This has the alarming effect of suggesting that removing a child’s wheelchair or tying them to a chair could be a lawful school sanction. The first statutory instrument was revoked because of a drafting error; a No. 3 version could correct this wording. Further, there is no duty on the UK Government to annually publish national statistics on the use of restraint and seclusion in schools, as there will be in Scotland, which is essential for monitoring the experiences of children with protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. Statutory guidance on the section 93A duty (contained within the revised wider use of force guidance) simply describes as best practice eliciting and recording the child’s perspective of an incident when this should be central to the recording process. As is so often the case, children’s human rights advocates can cheer legal advancements that are imminently set to provide greater protection for children, especially the most vulnerable, while remaining vigilant and ready to use the next opportunity to press for more.