Free checks and membership
One free check answers one question. Membership runs the whole year.
The free checks and the Quality Standard are genuinely useful on their own, and plenty of schools start there. This page sets out exactly what each one answers, and what is different once a school moves to membership.
Side by side
One question at a time, or the whole year connected
Both start from the same place: a school wanting to know where it stands. They cover very different amounts of ground.
Workflow reality
A free check
- Answers one question at a time: is the website compliant today, is safeguarding governance in reasonable shape, is a new governor ready for the role.
- A result for right now, based on what is true when it runs.
- Nothing carries over between checks. Running the same one again next term means starting again.
- The Quality Standard goes further again: a free, whole-framework self-assessment across all three stages, with nothing locked, though it stays a self-assessment until a stage is independently verified.
The loop
Membership
- Runs the whole governance year as one connected system: audit findings become risks, risks become actions, actions become the annual statement.
- Automated Website Compliance re-checks every page and policy each term on its own, not only when someone remembers to run it.
- Every school rolls up into one live view for a trust, not a set of separate one-off results.
- One price per school, per year, from £229 for a primary and £329 for a secondary, with everything included.
What changes in practice
Three moments where the difference shows
Not in theory. In the ordinary moments a school actually has.
The free website check flags a missing policy
It is a useful result for right now. Whether anyone checks again next term depends on remembering to run it.
Automated Website Compliance re-runs the same review every term on its own, so the same policy cannot quietly go missing again unnoticed.
The board finishes the free Quality Standard self-assessment
The board knows where it stands, by its own judgement.
The same evidence can be independently verified stage by stage, and the risks and actions behind it live in the same connected system.
A trust wants to see every school's position at once
Each school's free-check results sit in that school's own account, unconnected to the others.
Every school's position rolls up into one live view for the centre.
Who this matters to
What each seat gets from a free check, and from membership
The same board, four different reasons to want more than a one-off result.
Chair
A free check is a useful starting conversation. Membership is what the board actually runs the year on.
Headteacher
A free check confirms today's position. Membership keeps that position current without anyone having to remember to look.
Clerk
A free check gives a one-off result to file. Membership gives one live record to work from all year.
Governor
A free check is a good first look at where things stand. Membership is what lets a governor ask where things stand at any point in the year.
Get started
One twenty-minute call. No commitment.
See the whole system connected, with your own school's data in front of you.