School and academy trust website reviews – someone’s got to do it

Maintaining a school (and academy trust) website is no easy task. There are many deadlines and requirements to meet and therefore it is quite easy to miss the odd compliance requirement.

Ofsted inspection reports tend to highlight any deficiencies in the content of a school website and in some cases missing content can be the sole reason stopping your school from being rated as ‘Outstanding’.

This is why it is so important to ensure you have routine reviews of your website to ensure everything is up to date. This responsibility should not just lie with the school, but governors and trustees as well.

The Department for Education (DfE) has guidance which states exactly what academies, free schools and colleges must or should publish online, this can be found here. Furthermore, this guidance is regularly updated, with the most recent update taking place at the start of the academic year.

The latest update included the need for schools to publish their opening hours and their school uniform policy. Have you done this yet? Have you checked it's been done?

A word of warning with regards to the word “should”. The elements listed by the DfE website are seen as best practice and adhering to this will mean you are compliant for governance purposes as well as keeping Ofsted happy.

All stakeholders of the school will then have easy access to key information allowing for the level of transparency that the guidance is trying to achieve.

Also remember that if a parent requests a paper copy of the information on your website, you must provide this free of charge all whilst killing a few trees at the same time!

At PLR Advisory we are more than happy to conduct a school and trust website review on your behalf. If you are interested in this service, then please do book a discovery call with us today.

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