No one will mourn the death of the Schools Bill. No tears will be shed.

People who are not paid to closely follows the intricacies of education policy will happily go about their lives unaware it ever existed.

But that doesn’t mean that there are no consequences.

A botched job

It is not a surprise that it has finally been killed off by Rishi Sunak.

The bill - introduced in far too much of a hurry in May - was gutted in the Lords over concerns that, in trying to simplify the regulation of academy trusts, it gave the Department for Education (DfE) an uncomfortable amount of power.

In the chaos since then, with four different secretaries of state since the bill was unveiled, it was repeatedly delayed.

Given how little time, in legislative terms, Sunak’s government has before the next election, it would make little sense to prioritise a bill already on life support and with few friends.

The problem is that, even though the bill ended up in a mess, it did have an initial purpose and that purpose will not now be met.

Another fine mess...

Academies now make up the majority of England’s schools and the average academy trust gets larger every year, yet the laws that regulate them were designed in 1988, for a handful of city technology colleges.

They were never supposed to be the basis for the regulation of an entire school system, yet here we are with the DfE trying to manage thousands of schools without a proper legal framework for doing so.

Moreover, it’s the second time this has happened.

In 2016, when she was education secretary, Nicky Morgan brought out a White Paper designed to put the academies programme on to a secure legal footing on route to a fully academised system, but that died when Theresa May became prime minister.

So somehow, despite two attempts, and the fact they’ve been in power the entire time, the Conservatives will reach the end of this Parliament, after 14 years, with the academies system still operating on a set of interim, ad hoc mechanisms.

Much of the current regulatory framework, if you can call it that, rests on academy trusts’ contractual obligation to have regard to the annual handbook updates.

Where does this leave Labour?

It is a mixed blessing for Labour if we assume, as most now do, that they will inherit this system in 2024.

On the one hand, had the government passed a law sorting some of this out, it would have allowed Labour to focus on other, more voter-friendly projects. On the other, it does give them the opportunity to think about their own regulatory model.

For me, the biggest problem - which I explored in a paper earlier this year for the Institute for Government - is the government’s inability to properly regulate multi-academy trusts (MATs) for poor quality of education.

There are several large trusts that have received multiple termination notices for individual schools because of poor Ofsted results, yet there is nothing anyone can do to intervene at the trust level to tackle the problem wholesale.

If this isn’t a suitable role for the DfE to undertake directly then it needs to be delegated to an independent regulator.

It cannot be no one’s responsibility. At the same time, the regulation that does happen, because it’s through the handbook, is typically highly compliance-based and inappropriate.

Make do and mend is not a sustainable set-up

Labour may also want to explore whether the academies system should be permanently based on a centralised system controlled by the DfE.

While they certainly won’t want to put local authorities back in charge, there are other models of local and regional governance emerging, most notably metro mayors.

Either way, Labour will need to think through what they want the academies system to look like as they will not be able to write their own schools White Paper without a plan.

For now, everyone will keep on doing their best to make the current system work, as it has done for the past decade. There’ll be no dramatic crises. Nothing will go badly wrong enough to make the front pages.

But at some point, we will need to have a coherent legal framework for the entire English schools system.

Make do and mend is not a strategy.

Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute of Government and a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education