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Compliance & legislation

What schools should publish online

A summary of the information, policies and procedures that maintained schools and academies must publish on their websites.

Guidance
18/05/2023

All state schools are required to publish certain information on their websites. Requirements vary depending on the type of school.

While school and trust staff are responsible for maintaining the website, governing boards should ensure compliance with statutory requirements and assure themselves that effective procedures are in place to keep the website up to date.

Department for Education (DfE) guidance sets out the requirements in full. Academies may also need to consult the Academy Trust Handbook and their funding agreement.

Published information

See below for a summary of information and documents that schools are required to publish online. Refer to the DfE guidance for further details.

Schools and academy trusts must publish details of their governance structure and governing board membership.

The DfE also encourages governing boards to collect and publish governing board diversity data.

  • In foundation and voluntary-aided schools and academies, the governing board is responsible for admission arrangements and the school's website needs to set out how admissions are managed in line with the admissions code.
  • In the case of community and voluntary controlled schools, parents need to be referred to the local authority to find out about admission and appeal arrangements.

Schools and academies must publish their school uniform policy on their website.

The policy must have been developed in line with statutory guidance on the cost of school uniforms.

Schools and academies must publish their most recent Ofsted inspection report or a link to the Ofsted website.

Schools and academies must publish a range of test, exam and assessment results, including:

  • Key stage 2 (end of primary school) results

  • Key stage 4 (end of secondary school) results

  • Key stage 5 (16 to 18) information - attainment, retention and destinations

School and academy websites should also include a link to the school and college performance measures website.

Schools and academies should publish their opening and closing times as well as the official start and end times of the school day.

The government expects all state-funded mainstream schools currently to offer a school week of at least 32.5 hours (or be working towards this) by September 2023.

See our guidance on changing the length of the school day.

Schools and academies must publish details of the curriculum followed in each academic year and for each subject. Also:

  • phonics or reading schemes used key stage 1
  • courses available to pupils at key stage 4, including GCSEs
  • how parents and others can find out more about the curriculum

Governing boards must ensure that the school/trust policies required by law are in place, have been formally approved (by the governing board) and are readily accessible.

DfE guidance highlights that the following policies, procedures and information must be published on school and academy websites:

For further information, refer to our policy review schedules.

 

Pupil premium

All schools that receive pupil premium funding must publish a pupil premium strategy statement each year.

PE and school sport premium

Schools that receive PE and sport premium funding must publish information relating to the spending and impact of the premium.

Schools must also publish information about swimming competency for year 6 pupils.

  • Schools and academy trusts must publish the number of employees (if any) who have a gross annual salary of £100,000 or more in increments of £10,000.
  • Maintained schools must provide a link to their schools' page on the schools financial benchmarking service.
  • Academy trusts must publish their annual accounts, and a range of additional information detailed within the Academy Trust Handbook.

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