Your school website has always worked hard for your school. Now it can tell you how it is doing.

Today we are introducing Website Insights, a new dashboard built into your Schudio CMS. It gives you a clear, plain English view of your school website compliance and how inspection ready you are. This post explains what it does, what a compliant school website must publish, and why we have built it the way we have.

What Website Insights is

Website Insights is the new home screen for the Website area of your Schudio CMS. Log in, click Website, and it opens on an Overview that sums up how your site is doing in plain English. No jargon, no digging, and nothing to switch on.

The Website Insights Overview, the first thing you see when you open Website.

What you will see

The Overview brings the important things together in one place:

• Inspection readiness at a glance, with a simple status and the specific items to address.
• A compliance score, one honest number rather than a vague traffic light.
• Content health, what families can find and which pages are due a refresh.
• Interest in your key pages, including any uplift in views of your inspection and policy content.
• How you compare with other Schudio schools, so good work is recognised.
• Clear next steps, plus a report you can download and a monthly summary for leaders and governors.

Along the top you will also find tabs for Content health, Compliance, Recommendations and a Monthly report, so you can go as deep as you like.

What a compliant school website must publish

School website compliance can feel like a moving target. The Department for Education sets out what schools must publish online, and inspectors will expect to find it. Website Insights keeps an eye on all of it for you. Good school website compliance is really about keeping this content complete, published and current, so here is the shape of what a compliant school website should include.

Maintained schools, academies and voluntary controlled schools

The rules differ a little by type. Maintained schools follow the DfE list of what maintained schools must publish online. Academies and academy trusts follow their funding agreement, and voluntary controlled schools and free schools have their own small variations. If your school is managed by a local authority, or is an academy or free school, Website Insights applies the right set for you.

Contact details and admission arrangements

Every school must publish its contact details, including a postal address, a telephone number and a named person to contact. Add your school opening hours and your admission arrangements, including how to manage in year applications. These are among the pages parents look for most, so it pays to keep them easy to find.

Policies, including your behaviour policy

Publish your behaviour policy, your school complaints procedure, and your safeguarding and child protection policy. Publish your SEN information report too, setting out your support for pupils with special educational needs and for disabled pupils.

Curriculum, remote education and careers

Set out your curriculum by academic year and key stage, including the mandatory subjects and, where relevant, your music curriculum and music development plan. Publish your approach to remote education so families know what happens if pupils cannot attend. Secondary schools should publish their careers programme, covering technical education and the next steps at key stage 5.

Pupil premium and PE and sport premium

Publish your pupil premium strategy statement, which shows how the funding is spent and reviewed. Primary schools must also publish their PE and sport premium spending. Both should be updated each academic year.

Financial information and pay gap reporting

Academy trusts must publish financial information, including how many employees have a gross annual salary above a set threshold. Larger organisations must also publish gender pay gap information under pay gap reporting rules. It is one of the areas schools most often forget to refresh.

Your public sector equality duty

Publish your equality objectives and the information that shows how you meet the public sector equality duty, along with your accessibility plan. This should set out the steps you take to support and prevent disadvantage for disabled pupils.

Governance and academy trusts

Publish details of your governing body, and for academy trusts your structure and your body and committee meetings, so families and inspectors can see how the school is run.

A paper copy on request

Whatever you publish online, you must provide a paper copy free of charge to any parent who asks. Website Insights does not change that duty, but it does make sure the online version is complete and current, so the paper copy is simply a print away.

Why we are not building an Ofsted early warning system

You may have seen tools that promise to alert you the moment an inspector looks at your website. We have deliberately chosen not to build one, for two straightforward reasons.

First, those alerts feed the anxiety around inspection, and there is good evidence that a steady drip of alerts leaves us more anxious rather than more prepared. Second, they no longer work in the way they once did, because inspectors now tend to look at a school website only within 24 hours of an inspection, precisely so the picture cannot be gamed by a last minute scramble.

So our approach is the opposite. We show you a clear picture, and then we help you be genuinely ready all year round. Stay ready, rather than warned.

What this means for your school

No audit to commission, no spreadsheet to maintain, and no scramble in the days before an inspection. The information you need for your school website compliance is in one place, kept current for you, so you can spend less time wondering and more time on the things that matter.

When your website is in good shape all year, a busy week of policy page views is simply useful to know, never a reason to panic.

How to see it

If your school is with Schudio, it is already there. Log in to your CMS and click Website. If you are not with us yet and would like a look, or you are thinking about changing provider, we would love to hear from you. We can start over the summer so you are ready for September, or straight after the holidays if that suits your year better.

Frequently asked questions

What must a school website publish?

In short, your contact details, admission arrangements, your latest Ofsted report and results, your curriculum, key policies such as your behaviour policy and complaints procedure, your SEN information report, pupil premium and, for primary schools, PE and sport premium, your public sector equality duty information, governance details, and for academy trusts financial information. Maintained schools and academies have slightly different lists, and staying on top of all of it is what school website compliance really means.

Do maintained schools and academies have the same requirements?

They are broadly similar. Maintained schools follow the DfE list of what maintained schools must publish online. Academy trusts follow their funding agreement and must publish financial information. Voluntary controlled schools and free schools have minor variations, and Website Insights applies the right one for your school.

Do we have to provide a paper copy?

Yes. You must provide a paper copy of anything on your website free of charge to any parent who asks for one.

Does Website Insights send inspection alerts?

No. We do not send inspection alerts. We help you be Always Ready instead, so there is nothing to react to at the last minute.

Is it included, and is there anything to set up?

It is part of your Schudio CMS at no extra cost, it is on by default, and it updates automatically as you publish and edit your content.

Where does the information come from?

It is built from your own website and the publicly visible signals on it, alongside published pupil data. It does not use any private audit.

Take a look

Have a look next time you are in, and tell us what you think.