School Governance
Assurance Framework
Assurance Framework
Structured governance assurance for UK school governing boards.
Structured governance assurance for UK school governing boards.
Your school website is your public governance record. The Website crawls every page, opens every statutory policy, and reads each one to check it is the right document and how current it is. It scores nine areas against live DfE requirements, flags the content that has drifted, and hands the board a brief it can act on. Run it every term and watch the score climb.
A school website is not a set-and-forget task. Policies have review dates. Governor details change mid-year. Curriculum pages still reference last year’s priorities. Financial figures that should have been updated after the autumn census are still showing last year’s numbers. A policy gets re-uploaded as a draft and nobody notices for a term. None of this is negligence, it is the absence of a system.
When parents are choosing a school, the website shapes their view before they walk through the door. When a freedom of information request arrives, the website is the first line of defence. When the board needs assurance, the website is one of the clearest public records of whether the system is current.
The free Check-up tells you what is missing today. The Website goes deeper: it reads every policy and tells you what is expiring, what has drifted, what still reads as a draft or last year’s information, and which policies are due for review, then connects every finding to your Quality Standard as evidence.
A pattern-matching scan can tell you a behaviour policy exists. The Website opens it, confirms it is a behaviour policy, scores how complete it is, and reads the review date. Four layers of assurance, one scan.
Every page is crawled, including a hop to the trust website where academies host their policies centrally. Linked PDFs are opened. Nine compliance areas are scored against the current DfE list, from statutory content and policies to accessibility, privacy and governance transparency.
Each statutory policy is read in full. The audit confirms it is the right document, scores how complete it is, lists the sections that are present and the ones that are missing, and reads the review date so you know what is expiring and when.
The audit catches what a checklist cannot: a policy still marked draft, last year’s information left published, typos in a statutory statement, a broken link, contact details that disagree from one page to the next. The small things that quietly undermine a credible website.
Every scan ends with a plain-English summary of where the website stands and the handful of items worth fixing first, prioritised by how much they matter. Not a wall of red flags, a clear next step the board can sign off.
A fully compliant school website carries a real part of your governance evidence. The audit surfaces the policy pages, linked PDFs and statutory statements that prove the system is current, grouped the way the board reviews them.
School name and contact details, headteacher and chair named, admissions arrangements, latest Ofsted report linked, performance data, curriculum statement, ethos, uniform, careers programme and the Baker Clause.
Behaviour, complaints, safeguarding, SEN information report, pupil premium strategy, charging and remissions, RSE, equality objectives, accessibility plan, PE premium and policy review currency.
Governor names and categories, terms of office, meeting attendance, register of interests, committee structure and the academy financial disclosures a trust must publish.
Pupil premium statement, PE and sport premium, annual accounts, executive pay disclosure, benchmarking and gender pay reporting.
SEN information report, SENCO named, local offer link, provision types, disability admissions, accessibility facilities and the SEND complaints route.
Safeguarding policy, DSL named on the site, safer recruitment, Prevent duty, British Values and a clear whistleblowing route.
Accessibility statement published and in date, heading hierarchy, table headers, image alt text, colour contrast and keyboard navigation, so every family can use the site.
Pupil and parent privacy notices, data protection policy, data protection officer contact, cookie notice and the subject access rights families are entitled to.
Green hosting, a referenced climate action strategy, a sustainability statement and any eco-school accreditation, the area DfE expects every school to be moving on.
Enter your website URL or URN in the School Portal once. From then on a fresh scan is one click away, whenever the board needs an up-to-date position.
Every page is crawled and every policy is read. Review dates are extracted, content quality is checked, and each finding is scored and prioritised.
Findings map to the relevant elements of your Quality Standard. Confirm the evidence with one click. No spreadsheets, no duplicate work.
One button turns the latest scan into a single-page brief a head can read in sixty seconds and hand straight to the board. Your overall position, the short list of must-fix statutory items in priority order, your key school context and your inspection history pulled in alongside, so the conversation starts from facts.
It draws on your school’s Ofsted record too: the latest grades, the recommendations and the governance commentary, set next to where your website stands today. Preparation you can pick up and use whenever the board needs it.
This is what sets The Website apart. It does not just flag problems, it connects every finding to your Quality Standard and stands the website up as evidence for the governance functions it proves. One scan does two jobs.
Website findings map directly to framework elements with the live URL attached. Confirm with one click instead of hours of manual evidence gathering.
When a policy review date is current, the matching framework element shows evidence of an active review cycle, without anyone re-typing it into a spreadsheet.
The names and roles on your website are cross-checked against your GIAS record. Where they disagree, you see it early and put it right on your terms.
Each term, re-run the scan. See what improved, what slipped and what is new, a termly health check the board can point to.
The Website turns every scan into a working queue, so nothing sits in a report nobody opens.
Every finding lands in one queue, sorted Critical, Major or Minor, so the board and the school can see at a glance what to tackle first.
Pass an item to whoever owns that part of the website, with the live URL and what needs to change. No long email threads, no lost context.
Note what changed and close the item. The next scan confirms the fix held, so the board has a clean trail of issue raised, action taken, resolved.
For a trust, website compliance is a portfolio problem. The Website gives the central team one place to see where every school stands, spot the issue that repeats across the trust, and hold a consistent standard without chasing each site by hand.
See each school’s position and term-on-term direction side by side, so the schools that need support stand out.
When the same policy is expiring across several schools, you see it as a trust-wide theme to act on once, not the same issue found ten times.
The same audit, the same nine areas, the same evidence bridge for every school, so the central team can assure the board with confidence.
Most website-compliance tools stop at the website. The Website is one of the member tools that all feed one place: a board-level view of whether your governance is current. Your website audit sits next to your governor visits, your statutory monitoring, your meeting agendas and your board reports, building a single picture rather than a drawer of disconnected checks.
Every page and policy crawled, read and scored, with a board brief on demand.
A planned year of governor visits, each one captured as evidence.
A monitoring role for every statutory duty the board holds.
Board-ready agendas, mapped to the governance framework.
Your school’s data and trends in one governance snapshot.
The termly headteacher report, consistent and board-ready every time.
Start with the free Check-up to see where you stand in sixty seconds. Move to The Website when you want the policies read, the board brief and continuous assurance that feeds your Quality Standard.
No sign-up required
Included in membership
A compliance check is not a one-off. Done here, what the audit finds becomes part of the board’s wider assurance picture.
Every statutory page and policy you bring into line is logged as evidence, ready to show in the Quality Standard and the termly board pack.
A missing or out-of-date statutory policy is a candidate risk the board can weigh and, where it agrees, record in the Risk Register.
Across a multi-academy trust, each school’s website compliance rolls up to the Trust Command Centre, so the central board sees which sites need attention.