Benedict’s Law: what it actually requires of schools — and what it doesn’t
If you have read anything about Benedict’s Law in the past few weeks, you have probably been told that your school must now stock adrenaline auto-injectors and train every member of staff annually.
Neither of those is yet a legal requirement. Both probably will be. The difference matters more than it sounds, and it is a useful way into what the new duty actually asks of a governing body.
What the law says
Benedict’s Law is not a standalone Act. It is section 34 of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which amends section 100 of the Children and Families Act 2014. It is named after Benedict Blythe, who died from anaphylaxis at his school in 2021. The Department for Education published the accompanying statutory guidance, Allergy safety in schools, on 6 July 2026.
The duty itself is narrow and precise. A governing body must have an allergy safety policy, must publish it, must keep it under review, and must have regard to the statutory guidance. That is the whole of the statutory requirement as it currently stands.
“Have regard to” is carrying a good deal of weight in that sentence. It does not mean the guidance is optional. It means you must take account of it and consider it carefully, and that a decision not to follow it needs a clear and justifiable reason. The part most boards forget is the last bit: if you depart from the guidance, write down why. An unrecorded departure looks indistinguishable from an oversight.
What is not yet mandatory
The Act gives the Secretary of State power to make regulations requiring schools to stock spare adrenaline devices and to provide allergy safety training. Those regulations have not been made. A statutory duty to publicise and publish the policy is also expected to arrive the same way.
This is not a licence to do less. Both expectations sit in the statutory guidance, which means the have-regard standard applies to them, and a board that decided against stocking adrenaline would need a very good reason indeed. But it does change how a board should record its decisions, and it tells you that a second wave of requirements is coming. If your forward plan has no mechanism for noticing when those regulations are made, that is a gap worth closing now.
What will actually be tested
Here is the sentence from the guidance that should concentrate minds. Inspectors will consider allergy safety policies “and how well they are implemented”, as part of gathering evidence about the management of safeguarding.
Implementation, not the document. Most schools will produce a reasonable policy, because the DfE has published a template and the sector has moved quickly. Far fewer will be able to demonstrate, on the day someone asks, that every member of staff was trained this year, that the spare devices were checked last month, that the pupils who need Individual Healthcare Plans have them, and that the last near miss produced a change to something.
That gap — between a good policy and evidenced practice — is where governing bodies add value, and it is the thing a board is uniquely placed to test.
Three things most policies miss
Having read the guidance closely against a real policy, three omissions seem common enough to be worth naming.
- A section on unacceptable practice. The guidance says governing bodies should ensure the policy is explicit about what practice is not acceptable, and gives a list of examples: preventing easy access to medication, assuming every pupil needs the same support, assuming older pupils need none, requiring parents to come in to administer medication, creating barriers to trips. One example deserves to be read aloud in training — in an allergic emergency, help must come to the pupil, not the pupil to the help. Sending a child who is reacting to walk to the office is exactly the wrong response, and it is the kind of thing a well-meaning adult does under pressure. Very few policies I have seen say any of this.
- A link to the risk register. If your allergy policy says, as many do, that the governing body will ensure allergy risks are on the risk register, check that they are. A policy that imposes a duty on the board which the board has not discharged is the easiest finding an auditor will make all year, and the quickest to fix.
- An evidence trail. Training completion rates rather than assertions. The device check log. The register of pupils with allergies, reconciled against who has an Individual Healthcare Plan and who has an action plan from a clinician. The incident and near-miss log, with evidence that a lesson was actually learned. None of this is difficult, but it does not generate itself, and a board that asks for it termly will get it.
Questions worth asking at your next meeting
If you want a short agenda item rather than a project, four questions will tell you most of what you need to know.
- Who is our named allergy safety lead, and when did the governing body approve the policy?
- What proportion of staff completed allergy training this year, including catering, supply and regular volunteers?
- When were the spare adrenaline devices last checked, and can we see the log?
- How many pupils have a known allergy, how many have an Individual Healthcare Plan, and what are we doing about any gap between those two numbers?
If the answers come back promptly and with documents attached, you are in good shape. If they take three weeks, you have learned something more useful than any policy review would have told you.
A closing thought
Why is the duty is drawn as widely as it is? Around one in five children and young people with allergy have their first allergic reaction while at school, college or an early years setting.
That is the case for building arrangements around the whole school rather than around the children already known to be at risk — and it is a more persuasive argument to put to a sceptical colleague than any amount of citation of the Act.