Ofsted compliance is a critical part of your school website. This article isn’t written to teach you to suck eggs. You’ll already be well aware that inspectors use a school’s website to gain an initial impression of your school. If you’re a headteacher, you’ll also be more than aware of how many checklists are available online. So, how do you determine the best way to sustainably carry out a school website audit?

Here are the steps you can take to ensure you get compliant and, more importantly, stay compliant during 2018.

Use Current School Website Audit Information

School website requirements change at least two or three times a year. Often they are just a small change that is easy to implement but occasionally, there are wholesale changes. They often occur at the beginning of an academic year but updates can be announced at any time.

It’s important to make sure you’re up to date so, as a rule, authorities and other agencies do a good job of keeping schools accurate and current.

The single best way to keep up to date with the very latest school website requirements is to read (and download a copy of) our School Website Requirements Guide. It’s much, much more than a checklist and is packed with actionable, current advice. 

Set Aside Time to Audit your School Website

The current requirements are extensive and it will take some time to make sure you have completed a thorough school website audit. This is especially true if you’re using a paper and pen method (more on that later). Setting aside time to complete a full audit and action any follow up work will go a long way to ensuring a successful outcome.

If you simply don’t have the time, employ a professional to carry out an audit on your behalf. Here’s where you can find out more about our Pro School Website Audits.

Take Expert Advice on Specific Requirements

Where do you go for advice when carrying out a school website audit? Maybe your Multi Academy Trust has resources you can use? Or, maybe the local authority has insights?

For our part, we write advice driven, up to date content on all parts of the requirements set by DfE regularly. What’s more we have a unique method of ensuring the advice is relevant and highly useful. We’ll get to that.

Here’s a couple of examples:
Pupil Premium School Website Requirements
How to Create the Best School Website SEN Page
Ofsted School Website Requirements lots of schools are missing

Schedule Follow Up Tasks

If you’re carrying out a detailed audit it is critical that you follow up the completed work with tasks to fix any issues and fill in any gaps.

If you need other members of the school team to write policies then action those and install them on your website in a way that is readable on any device. (Here’s how Schudio School Websites achieve that – School Website Features: Content Creation)

What ever your next steps are, plan ahead and action each step.

Keep up to Date with the Latest Ofsted Requirements

How do you keep up to date with the very latest Ofsted requirements? Or perhaps a more pertinent questions; how do you know which check list to use from the hundreds that drop into your inbox?

You can go direct to the source and keep an eye on the DfE website that displays all requirements. You can rely on information to filter through your supply chain.

Or, as I mentioned before, you can simply use one free guide to manage all of this and keep up to date …

Three Marketing Leading Tools for School Website Requirements Excellence

All of the above can be achieved by using school website requirements resources from Schudio. We provides the easiest, most effective way for you check your website against the latest requirements. Here’s why:

• We keep the free School Website Requirements Guide up to date with the latest requirements on your behalf.
• You can check your website against those requirements while viewing your website in the same window using our School Website Compliance Software (a lovely online too).
• You can ask one of our experts to carry out an audit for you.

A few things to remember …

• When requirements change, we update the Guide and the School Website Compliance Software and email you about the changes within 48 hours.
• You can comment any action points throughout the School Website Compliance Software and create a follow up plan.

The School Website Compliance Software has revolutionised the way website managers conduct detailed school website audits and has saved an incredible amount of time for many, many schools. The information is also used to inform how we support schools, the products we build and the advice we write about.

So, there simply is no better way to carry out a school website audit. If you’d like to get starting taking complete control of your compliance needs, sign up here.