School Website Statutory Information: What to Publish and Where

Every school website has two audiences. Prospective parents want photos, a sense of the school's character and an easy way to book a visit. Inspectors, governors, local authority officers and existing parents need specific documents: the behaviour policy, the SEN information report, the pupil premium statement, admissions arrangements and more. The second set is not optional. It is required by regulations and funding agreements, and missing or out-of-date items are easy for anyone to spot.

The Department for Education (DfE) publishes two guidance pages that list what must or should be published: one for maintained schools and one for academies, free schools and colleges. Both were last updated on 24 October 2024 at the time of writing and both apply to England. This article turns them into a practical checklist, a calendar of publication deadlines, and a website structure that makes the information easy to find and easy to keep current. Always check the live DfE pages before relying on any detail, because they are updated from time to time.

For maintained schools, the DfE guidance explains that specific information must be published to comply with the School Information (England) Regulations 2008, as amended in 2012 and 2016, and other legislation including the Equality Act 2010 and the Children and Families Act 2014. Schools without their own website must publish the information on an alternative website and give parents a link. A school should provide a paper copy free of charge if a parent or carer asks.

For academies and further education colleges, the requirement comes from the funding agreement or accountability agreement, with additional duties under the Equality Act 2010 and the Children and Families Act 2014. The academy guidance distinguishes carefully between what academies "must" and "should" publish, so trusts need to read their own funding agreement alongside it.

The following list summarises the "must" items in the DfE guidance for maintained schools. Some apply only to certain types or phases of school.

Schools with 250 or more employees also have gender pay gap duties under the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017, including publishing the information prominently on their website within one year of the snapshot date, which for most public authority employers is 31 March.

The guidance also lists items the DfE recommends. They are not legal requirements for maintained schools, but parents look for them and inspectors may notice their absence.

• Governor details: structure and remit of the board and committees with the chairs' names; for each governor who served in the past 12 months, their full name, appointment date, term of office, date stepped down, who appointed them, attendance over the last academic year, and relevant business, financial and pecuniary interests.
• Music development plan, alongside the music curriculum.
• Ethos and values statement.
• Remote education provision.
• School opening hours: official start and end of the compulsory day and the total weekly time.
• Uniform policy: required and optional items, seasonal items, branded versus generic items, where to buy them and where to find second-hand uniform.
• Board diversity data, published in a way that does not identify individuals.

Academy trusts publish much of the same information, but there are notable differences in the DfE's academy guidance:

• Annual report and accounts: academy trusts must publish their audited annual report and accounts by 31 January each year, with guidance in the academy trust handbook.
• Executive pay: trusts must publish the number of employees whose salary and related benefits exceeded £100,000 in the previous academic year ending 31 August, in £10,000 bands and in an easily accessible form.
• Admissions: the trust, as admission authority, publishes arrangements and appeal timetables, subject to the codes that apply to it.
• Policies: several items that are "must" for maintained schools appear as "should" for academies, while the funding agreement may require them anyway.

Multi-academy trusts need to decide what sits on the trust website and what on each school's site. A common approach is to publish trust-level documents, such as accounts and governance, once on the trust site and link to them from every school, while school-specific items stay on the school's own pages.

Results pages cause more confusion than most, because the measures the DfE publishes have changed in recent years. The maintained schools guidance requires all schools to link to the compare school and college performance service and to their own performance measures page there. Beyond that, the requirements depend on phase:

• Primary schools publish their most recent key stage 2 measures as published by the Secretary of State: the percentage of pupils reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and maths combined, the percentage reaching a higher standard, and average scaled scores in reading and in maths. The guidance explains that key stage 1 to key stage 2 progress measures cannot be calculated for 2023 to 2024 or 2024 to 2025, because there is no key stage 1 baseline after Covid disruption.
• Secondary schools publish their Progress 8 score, the percentage of pupils achieving grade 5 or above in GCSE English and maths, and their Attainment 8 score. They should also publish destinations after key stage 4, EBacc entry and the EBacc average point score.
• Schools with sixth forms publish headline 16 to 18 measures on progress, attainment, retention and destinations, with some measures not required for years in which the Secretary of State did not publish them.

The safest approach on the website is a short results page that states which academic year each figure relates to, shows the required measures exactly as published, and links to the official performance service for comparison. Avoid mixing in internal tracking data or selective highlights that could be read as official results.

Some requirements are easy to overlook because they are one line in the guidance. The contact page must name the member of staff who deals with queries from parents and the public, not just give a general office email. Mainstream schools must name their special educational needs co-ordinator and give contact details. The curriculum section must tell parents about their right to withdraw a child from all or part of religious education. Schools with key stage 1 must list the phonics or reading schemes they use, and schools with key stage 4 must list their courses, including GCSEs. Each is quick to fix once spotted.

Many items have fixed annual deadlines in the DfE guidance. Putting them into a shared calendar, with a named owner for each, is the simplest way to avoid gaps.

The admission appeals timetable has detailed content rules: parents must have at least 20 school days from notification of an unsuccessful application to lodge an appeal, at least 10 school days' notice of the hearing, and decision letters should go out within 5 school days of the hearing wherever possible.

Statutory information is only useful if people can find it. Many school sites bury policies in a single long list of PDFs with names like "Policy 2023 final v2". A clearer structure helps everyone, including the office staff who maintain it.

1. A "Key information" section in the main navigation, with clear sub-pages rather than one document dump.
2. Sub-pages by topic: Admissions; Curriculum; SEND; Pupil premium and sports premium; Policies; Governance; Performance and Ofsted; Financial information; Equality.
3. A short summary on each page in HTML, with the full document attached, so parents can read the essentials on a phone.
4. A "last reviewed" date on every page and document.
5. Consistent file names, for example "Behaviour policy, reviewed September 2026".
6. Contact details and the SENCO visible from every page, typically in the footer.

Accessibility is part of compliance

The DfE guidance notes that if a school publishes its PE and sport premium digital form return as its report, it must be converted to HTML to meet accessibility requirements. The same logic applies to other documents: scanned PDFs and images of text are hard or impossible to read with assistive technology. Publishing summaries as web pages and providing accessible documents makes the information usable by all parents, including those with disabilities.

Statutory pages fail quietly. A policy is updated at a governors' meeting, but the website still shows last year's version; a governor steps down and stays listed for months. A few habits prevent that:

• Give each statutory item a named owner, usually the person who writes or approves the document.
• Add website publication as the final step in every policy review, recorded in the governors' minutes.
• Run a termly check against the DfE lists, ideally by someone who did not upload the documents.
• Use the content management system's scheduling and review reminders where available.
• Subscribe to email updates on both DfE guidance pages so changes are noticed when they happen.

A school website that is easy for office staff to edit is the best guarantee of compliance. Complex designs that need a developer for every document upload tend to drift out of date.

We design and build school and trust websites with a clear key information structure, accessible templates and simple editing for office teams; see our website accessibility and website redesign services. Simple websites start from EUR 300 excl. VAT, as listed on our pricing page. For a school or multi-academy trust site, request a quote and include a link to your current website.

• DfE: What maintained schools must or should publish online
• DfE: What academies, free schools and colleges must or should publish online