OFSTED School Website Compliance. Is Your School Compliant?

OFSTED produces a range information to include on school websites and the various ways in which they need to demonstrate compliance. This can often be a difficult issue for heads who may want to review and revamp their website but don’t have the technical expertise to do so.

The good news is that Parent Apps can now undertake a free check of your website and, if needed, build a new and fully compliant site.

Websites can often sit online for year and not be updated. It’s a kind of technology that changes quite quickly, however, and regular reviews are important. For example, can your website be viewed just as easily on a mobile as it can on a laptop? More and more of us nowadays are accessing information via our smartphones and tablets rather than more traditional computers. That means you need to have different designs that show up on each device so that parents, teachers and pupils can access the information they need.

There’s also a lot of information that needs to be provided on your website to satisfy OFSTED’s current guidelines.

Are your admission arrangements properly explained?
Have you got all your school contact details on the site and are they easy to access?
Have you got a link to your most recent OFSTED report?
Do you have a space for exam results and provide information about your curriculum?
What about your school behaviour policy and how can someone make a complaint?

These are just a few of the things that your website should include as a standard. There are other desirable options such as linking to social media, including downloadable forms such as permission slips and timetables, uploading picture galleries of children’s work, developing news feeds and blog pages. All these can improve communication with parents and help you comply with everything OFSTED is looking for.

It’s not just the content that is important for any school website. The structure and how easy it is to navigate are also vital. If you have information on your site but parents, teachers and pupils can’t find it, that’s just as bad as not having it there in the first place. Websites often get published to the internet and then left without any changes or updates. Even worse can be adding new structures and folders that make the site difficult to navigate over time.

You should, realistically, review your website on a regular basis and check it against OFSTED’s compliance rules. More than that, you should be looking at the site from the point of view of its users and whether they are getting value out of it.

Parent Apps are now offering a free check for school websites. We’ll be able to see whether you are complying with OFSTED requirements and make suggestions on how you can improve the look, feel and usability of your site. Updating and improving your site can not only make it better in the eyes of the governing bodies, it can also improve your ranking in search engines and get your school noticed better in local searches.