What this is
A Member’s Bill introduced by Daniel Johnson MSP, introduced on 17 March 2025, passed at Stage 3 on 24 March 2026 by 121 votes to 0, with none abstaining and eight not voting, and became an Act of the Scottish Parliament on 26 May 2026.
It applies to public and independently funded schools. It does not apply to nursery schools. It is named after a pupil who was restrained at his special school at the age of 11 until he lost consciousness, and whose family campaigned for more than a decade.
What it records
The Act requires Scottish ministers to issue statutory guidance on restraint and seclusion in schools, and allows them to set training standards. It places duties on schools: to inform parents and carers when a child has been restrained or secluded, and to record and report each incident.
Its stated aim is that restraint is used only as a last resort, where there is an immediate risk of harm. The Parliament’s own page sets out the terms the Act works with. Restraint is preventing someone’s movement. Seclusion is isolating someone and preventing them from leaving the place where they are isolated.
The Parliament’s reasoning is worth keeping. Staff should have detailed guidance and be trained in de-escalation and in what are and are not appropriate techniques, and information on how often they are used should be available, so that schools, education authorities and inspectors can see where practice needs to improve.
How to read it
This is a law about records and disclosure, not about holds. The duties bite at the point of writing, and the hardest is the one owed to a parent.
Telling a parent is a test of the record, not a separate task. If you cannot say what you did, for how long, and why, you cannot have that conversation honestly. A school that has to make that phone call the same day will record differently from one that does not. That is how a reporting duty changes behaviour faster than a training standard.
It stops at the nursery door. The two restraint deaths of young children recorded in the UK in 2022 both happened in nurseries, in settings no duty of this kind covers. The settings left out of a law are where the next failure tends to happen.
Where it stops
Royal Assent, not a finished regime. The statutory guidance and the training standards are still to be drafted, and teaching unions are to be consulted on them. The duties on schools are created but not yet fleshed out, and the content a trainer will eventually teach does not exist in final form.
The Act text itself was not read for this page. Its date, scope and purpose rest on the Scottish Parliament’s bill page, and the campaign background rests on BBC reporting from the Stage 3 debate. Commencement dates, enforcement and any sanction for a school that fails to record are not in the sources held.
Scotland only. This page does not describe the law in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, where the record holds no equivalent duty.
Sources
- Scottish Parliament, Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill, became an Act on 26 May 2026
- BBC News, ‘Calum’s Law’ on school child restraint passes at Holyrood, 24 March 2026
If your setting has to write down every restraint and explain it to a parent, our restraint reduction training for schools covers the record, the review and the conversation afterwards.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.