Two dates this term. Both of them land on the board’s paperwork.

The Act was passed in December 2025 and commenced in phases from January 2026. By the start of this term a substantial amount of it is in force, and a board reviewing its position now is catching up rather than preparing.

Note the second line of that February entry. Ten calendar days is the notice a union must now give before industrial action, and a good number of schemes of delegation were written when it was fourteen. If your board could just about convene and decide on a partial closure in two weeks, it needs to check whether it can do it in ten days, and who decides if it cannot.

Taken separately, the two changes look like housekeeping. Taken together they change the arithmetic of every staffing decision a board makes.

Under the old position, a member of staff dismissed with eighteen months’ service had no unfair dismissal claim at all, because the qualifying period was two years. Any claim they did have had to be lodged within three months.

From January, six months’ service is enough. From October, the window to lodge is six months. Schools dismiss most often inside the first year: probation not confirmed, capability in an early appointment, a fixed term not renewed. Precisely that group has just become able to claim.

Work an example. A probationary dismissal decided in February 2027, of somebody with eight months’ service, is now claimable, and remains claimable into the following August. Add the removal of the compensation cap and the cost of getting the process wrong stops being predictable.

And what a tribunal examines in an unfair dismissal case is not principally whether the decision was right. It is whether the process was fair. In a maintained school that process ends in front of a panel of governors.

From 30 October the duty is to take all reasonable steps. The single added word raises the threshold from doing something sensible to demonstrating that nothing reasonable was left undone. The duty also extends to harassment by third parties across other protected characteristics.

Schools carry an unusual density of third parties. Pupils. Parents. Contractors and site visitors. Visiting sports coaches, peripatetic music teachers, exam board staff, other schools’ staff at fixtures and moderation. Very few employers have this many people on site who are not employees, and very few have as much cultural reluctance to challenge a parent.

There is a real awkwardness in the timing, and it is worth naming rather than working around. The regulations that will define what “all reasonable steps” means are not expected until 2027. The duty arrives before its own definition. Boards are being asked to assure a standard that has not been written down yet.

Waiting is the wrong response, because the duty bites from 30 October regardless. What the government has indicated it expects is documented and preventative rather than reactive:

• A risk assessment that specifically covers harassment, including by third parties.
• A published, accessible policy that staff can actually find.
• A reporting route that works, and evidence that it is used.
• Training for those who manage others.
• A record that the board asked for all of the above and was told the answer.

Responding well after an incident, which is what most schools do competently, is explicitly no longer sufficient on its own.

One structural note. Boards already receive a safeguarding report, and this is not it. Safeguarding is about pupils. This is a duty owed to staff, and it needs its own line in the assurance cycle rather than being folded into an item that is already full.

The Act re-establishes the SSSNB as a statutory body. It is the one part of this legislation written specifically for schools, and it is the part most likely to be misread in both directions, either ignored or treated as an emergency.

What it is: a body bringing employers and staff representatives together to negotiate minimum national terms for school support staff. Floors, not ceilings.

Who it covers: directly employed support staff in maintained schools and academies. That covers teaching assistants, administrative staff, technicians and some middle leadership roles, including off-site trust employees in finance and administration. Senior strategic leaders are excluded.

When it bites: the body is being formally established in autumn 2026. Existing arrangements continue through the 2026–27 financial year. SSSNB outcomes apply from 2027–28 at the earliest. The first item on its agenda is maternity pay, which the Department describes as the first national improvement to maternity provision for school support staff in twenty-five years.

The Department’s position is that employers need take no immediate action, and that guidance on exactly which staff are covered is due in the autumn term. Establishing the body does not, of itself, replace existing grading structures, pay spines or progression mechanisms.

The board-level point ends there. The operational work is a year away; the financial assumption is being made now, in the forecasts trusts are building this term.

A further block of measures is expected during 2027 without confirmed dates. Two of them matter disproportionately to schools.

Guaranteed hours. Workers on zero or low hours will gain a right to be offered guaranteed hours reflecting the hours they actually work, with requirements about notice of shifts. In most sectors this is a retail and hospitality story. In a school it means exam invigilators, midday supervisors, sports coaches, peripatetic music teachers, wraparound care staff and cover supervisors. The governing board approves the staffing structure; a right to guaranteed hours changes what that structure costs and how it has to be described.

Collective redundancy. The threshold for collective consultation is being changed, and for a multi-academy trust the question of whether the count is per school or across the trust is not academic. It decides whether a restructure triggers a 30-day or 45-day consultation, with a 180-day protective award now sitting behind a failure.

Also expected: expanded flexible working rights, bereavement leave including pregnancy loss, enhanced dismissal protection for pregnant employees and new mothers, mandatory gender equality and menopause action plans for larger employers, restrictions on non-disclosure agreements, and a requirement to keep annual leave records for six years.

This is the question boards most often answer wrongly about themselves, and every duty above attaches to the answer.

• Community and voluntary controlled schools. The local authority is the employer. The governing board nonetheless holds delegated staffing functions under the School Staffing (England) Regulations 2009, and takes the dismissal decision.
• Foundation, voluntary aided and foundation special schools. The governing board is the employer, and issues the notice of termination itself.
• Academies. The academy trust is the employer. How much reaches a local governing body is a matter for the trust’s scheme of delegation, and in many trusts the answer is very little, which is fine so long as everyone knows it.

In every case the member of staff facing dismissal has a right to a hearing, and a right of appeal to a panel drawn from the board. New employment law meets an old governance problem at exactly that point.

More claimable dismissals means more staffing panels, and staffing panels have the same scarce resource that complaints panels do: governors with no prior involvement.

Two clean groups are needed, not one. A panel to take the decision, and a separate panel to hear the appeal, none of whom has expressed a view beforehand. A board that discusses a live capability case in full meeting has, in that hour, disqualified its own appeal panel. The resulting delay while a panel is rebuilt is exactly the kind of procedural failure that gets examined later.

The fix is dull and works: decide at the start of the year who sits on staffing panels and who sits on appeals, keep both groups off the correspondence, and route individual cases to the people handling them rather than to everybody.

It is not a reason to stop dismissing people who should be dismissed. Schools that respond to a shorter qualifying period by keeping unsuitable staff in post do more damage than any tribunal award would.

Nor is it a reason to route everything through solicitors. Most of what changes here is procedural discipline that a competent governance professional does as a matter of course: the right panel, the right notice, the reasoning recorded, the file in one place. The legal advice is for the hard cases, and it is far cheaper when the record is already in order.

• Employment Rights Act 2025, legislation.gov.uk.
• What is the School Support Staff Negotiating Body?, Department for Education, The Education Hub.
• Employment Rights Act 2025: October 2026 implementation dates confirmed, Blake Morgan.
• How the Employment Rights Act will affect schools, Tes.
• Employment law changes 2026: guide for schools and colleges, Irwin Mitchell.
• The School Staffing (England) Regulations 2009, legislation.gov.uk.
• Staffing and employment advice for schools, Department for Education.
• Sexual harassment at work, Acas.

Boardmet is a governance support provider, not a law firm. Where a matter carries legal risk, take advice from your solicitors. Statutory timescales change; check the current version of the guidance before you rely on a date.

Panels, schemes of delegation, retention and minuted reasoning are governance work, and they are the first things that slip when a board has nobody holding the cycle.

• Specialist panels for staffing and appeal panels clerked independently, by someone with no history with the case.
• Governance recovery to bring the scheme of delegation, the records and the practice back into line before the January change.
• Interim governance support when there is nobody holding the register, the cycle or the file at all.
• What the board should be seeing about complaints for the same panel-pool problem on the complaints side.