Ofsted School Website Requirements – Ensure your School Website is Ofsted Ready

As is the nature of the beast, Ofsted traditionally gives you one day’s notice for your next inspection. Therefore, you need to make sure that your school’s online brand touchpoints are in order and compliant in line with Ofsted guidance on school website requirements.

Over time, the school website has certainly evolved in stature. Since September 2015, Ofsted have introduced statutory website requirements, which are now an official contributing factor to your school’s final result . Firstly, please be aware that these requirements can differ depending on whether you are a Maintained School or Academy, Free School or Sixth Form College.

Luckily for you, as a school branding agency with over 20 years’ experience, Cleverbox have compiled a handy ‘how to’ guide to ensure compliance in preparation for your Ofsted visit, which you can download below! First though, let’s pull out some examples from the checklist’s ‘essential’ section, and run through why they’re included:

First Things First: Some Examples of What is ‘Essential’?

Providing Full Admissions Information For Students

You will need to supply full information on your application processes, including an extensive timeline on when your open days are scheduled for, when the application process can be undertaken, and if applicable, information on any priority admission protocol that is in place.

Anti-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying

Across the entire education sector, we’ve seen such positive steps taken for schooling life to be more inclusive, and this has rightly been incorporated into the Ofsted guidelines.

It is highly recommend the school reviews annually how it complies with the public sector equality duty and improves equality of opportunity.

The School Curriculum

The content of the curriculum in each academic year and for every subject is one facet of your school that can often be overlooked on school websites. This information is essential not only for parents (or prospective parents) to find out more about your learning strategy, but also to ensure that the school is complying with Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations. This shows that your school is making the curriculum fully accessible for all.

Download Our Ofsted School Website Requirements Checklist

If you are a multi-academy trust and you are responsible for overseeing a multitude of websites, you might take a look at the above and be overawed by the depth of these requirements. That’s where Cleverbox comes in…

Introducing the Key Information Manager – Ideal for Schools and Trusts to ensure compliance

With our sophisticated Key Information Manager (KIM) service, you can ensure pivotal statutory policies remain up to date through a tracking system. Trusts would have the added benefit of managing policies and documents across all of their individual school websites from one central control panel. Here are just some of the ways that the Cleverbox KIM can revolutionise your way of working:

• The documents that you post live on the system become instantly accessible for parents – and for Ofsted to find – thanks to a slick, intuitive and easy to use interface
•  Your office administration team will thank you! A KIM will save your team valuable time every term by alleviating repetitive processes to each individual site in your trust. Don’t just take our word for it though, here is an endorsement from one of our Trust clients who have already implemented the Cleverbox KIM for their schools:

The Key Information Manager has transformed the way we manage policies and statutory information across the Federation. It helps to proactively manage Head Office and Academy policies, notifying us in advance of renewal dates and providing us with invaluable operational oversight.

Head of Compliance, Leading London Trust

As referenced here, this system also sends reminders to you in advance to let you know that one or more of your policies is due for renewal.

So there you have it, not only an introduction to our fantastic KIM control panel, but also an in-depth checklist outlining the information you must publish on your school website to ensure you are Ofsted ready. If you’d like any more information on the KIM, how it can benefit your team’s workflow, and how we can help you with your school’s Ofsted requirements, you can call our team today on 020 8466 7222 or email us at team@cleverbox.co.uk.