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DfE · Schools

What every UK school must publish on its website: the DfE statutory list

By Jordan Gilbert

In brief

The Department for Education maintains two statutory lists of what a school website must carry: What maintained schools must publish online and the parallel guidance for academies, free schools, and colleges. Between them they name admissions arrangements, the behaviour and complaints policies, the curriculum by subject and year, the SEN information report, financial and equality information, Ofsted and performance links, and, for academies, governance documents such as the funding agreement and the trustees' register of interests. Several items carry fixed annual deadlines. A school must also provide a paper copy free of charge on request. Missing items are the first thing an inspector's desk research finds.

This briefing is general guidance, current at the time of writing. It is not legal advice. The Department for Education updates its publication guidance, and the exact list that applies to your school depends on its type and phase, so verify the current wording with the DfE and your governance lead before you rely on it.

Almost every school website carries most of what the law requires and quietly misses two or three items. That gap does not show up in day-to-day use. It shows up in the one place it matters: the pre-inspection desk research, where an inspector reads the live site against the Department for Education’s statutory publication list before setting foot on site. A school that is missing the curriculum-by-subject-and-year page, or an out-of-date pupil premium statement, begins the inspection explaining a gap rather than describing a strength.

This is the map. It sets out what the DfE requires a school website to carry, what is specific to academies and trusts, the items that carry hard deadlines, and the paper-copy duty that sits underneath all of it.

The two DfE lists

There is no single “school website law”. The requirement is assembled from statutory guidance and underlying legislation. The two anchor documents are the Department for Education’s guidance pages:

  • What maintained schools must publish online, for community, foundation, and voluntary schools maintained by a local authority.
  • What academies, free schools and colleges should publish online, the parallel list for academy trusts and their schools.

The two lists overlap heavily. The differences matter, and they are set out below. Both guidance pages draw the specific items from underlying law: the SEN information report from the Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014, the complaints duty from section 29 of the Education Act 2002, the behaviour policy from the Education and Inspections Act 2006, and so on. The DfE guidance is the readable index; the legislation is the force behind it.

What a maintained school must publish

The following are the items the DfE names for maintained schools. Group them and the list is less daunting than it looks.

About the school and how to contact it:

  • Contact details. The school’s postal address, telephone number, and the name of the member of staff who deals with queries from parents, carers, and the public.
  • The name and contact details of the special educational needs co-ordinator (the SENCO), for mainstream schools.
  • A statement of the school’s ethos and values.

Admissions and the school day:

  • Admission arrangements, published to fixed dates: the arrangements for the normal September point of entry, in-year admissions information, and the appeals timetable. These carry the tightest calendar duties on the whole list.

Policies parents and pupils rely on:

  • The behaviour policy, complying with section 89 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006.
  • The complaints policy, as required by section 29 of the Education Act 2002, including how the school handles complaints about the support it provides to pupils with special educational needs.
  • Charging and remissions policies, setting out where charges apply and where they can be waived.

The curriculum and provision:

  • The content of the curriculum in each academic year for every subject, plus how parents can find out more. This is the single item most sites miss. A “curriculum” page that describes the school’s approach in general terms does not satisfy a requirement written as each subject, each year.
  • Related curriculum items: the phonics or reading scheme at key stage 1, the list of key stage 4 courses, information about the right to withdraw from religious education, and the accessibility plan.
  • The SEN information report, containing the items specified in Schedule 1 to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014, published and reviewed annually.

Results, standards, and equality:

  • A link to the DfE’s compare-school-and-college-performance service and the relevant key-stage performance measures.
  • The most recent Ofsted report, or a link to it on the Ofsted website.
  • How the school complies with the public sector equality duty (updated yearly) and its equality objectives (at least every four years).

Money and premiums:

  • The pupil premium strategy statement, using the DfE template.
  • The PE and sport premium breakdown, for primary schools, including the year 6 swimming competency percentages.
  • Financial information: the number of employees whose benefits exceed £100,000, in £10,000 bands, and a link to the schools financial benchmarking service.

Governance:

  • Governance information: the structure and remit of the governing body and its committees, and the required details for each governor.

The DfE also lists items a school should publish, short of a strict must, including the school’s opening hours, its uniform policy, and its remote-education provision. Treating the “should” items as optional is a common misjudgement; inspectors and parents look for them.

What is different for academies and trusts

Academy trusts carry everything above in substance, plus a set of governance and financial-transparency items that flow from their status as charitable companies rather than local-authority schools. The DfE’s academies guidance adds, in particular:

  • The trust’s funding agreement and any supplemental agreements.
  • The trust’s memorandum and articles of association.
  • The names of the trust’s members and trustees, and up-to-date details of the trust’s governance arrangements and scheme of delegation.
  • The relevant business and financial interests of members, trustees, and local governors, the register that underpins conflict-of-interest management.
  • The trust’s audited annual report and accounts, published by 31 January.
  • Executive pay transparency: the number of employees whose benefits exceed £100,000, in £10,000 bands.
  • A relationships (and, where applicable, sex) education policy, and the careers provider-access policy statement for secondary and 16-to-19 provision.

The complaints procedure for an academy is measured against the Education (Independent School Standards) Regulations 2014 rather than section 29, a small but real difference in the standard the page has to meet. The practical point for a multi-academy trust is that these items multiply: each academy in the trust needs its own compliant publication set, and the trust-level documents need to be findable, ideally from every school in the trust.

The items with hard deadlines

Most of the list is “keep it current”. A handful carry fixed dates, and these are the ones that slip:

  • Admission arrangements for the normal point of entry, and the associated in-year and appeals information, to their statutory dates.
  • The pupil premium strategy statement, by 31 December.
  • The PE and sport premium report, by 31 July.
  • The academy trust’s annual report and accounts, by 31 January.
  • The equality information, updated yearly, and the equality objectives, refreshed at least every four years.
  • The gender pay gap report, for any body with 250 or more employees, within a year of the snapshot date.

A date-driven item that is a year stale is a worse finding than one that is merely thin, because it evidences a governance process that is not running. The fix is not heroics in December; it is a publication calendar the estate holds so the dates do not depend on someone remembering.

The publication discipline behind the list

Two duties sit underneath the whole list and are easy to overlook.

The paper-copy duty. The DfE guidance is explicit: a school should provide a paper copy of the published information free of charge if a parent or carer requests it. The website is the default channel, not the only one, and the site should say plainly how to request a paper copy.

Currency and findability. The requirement is not only that an item exists somewhere on the site. In practice each item needs to be current, dated, and reachable within a click or two of the homepage, because that is how it is checked. A policy buried three levels deep with no review date reads as absent even when it is technically present. A dependable pattern is a single policies index, every document carrying a “last reviewed” and “next review” date, linked from the footer of every page.

The Publication Completeness Test

When we audit a school estate against the DfE list, this is the pass we run. It converts a long statutory list into a repeatable check.

The Publication Completeness Test. For each item on the applicable DfE list (maintained or academy): (1) Is it present on the live site? (2) Is it reachable within two clicks of the homepage, or from a single linked policies index? (3) Does it carry a visible date, and for the date-driven items, is that date current? (4) For academies, are the trust-level governance documents findable from the school’s own site? (5) Does the site say how to request a free paper copy? An item that fails any of the first four is a finding; the fifth is a single fix that covers the whole list.

Run it once a term and the inspection desk-research pass holds no surprises, because the school has already read its own site the way the inspector will.

How a regulated-grade estate handles this

Custodiance runs a school or trust’s web estate as a managed, in-jurisdiction service, so the publication list is a property of the estate rather than a scramble before an inspection. In practice that means:

  • A structured policies-and-publication index, every item mapped to its DfE requirement, each document carrying a visible “last reviewed” and “next review” date.
  • A publication calendar the estate holds, so the date-driven items (pupil premium by 31 December, PE and sport premium by 31 July, academy accounts by 31 January) are prompted, not remembered.
  • The curriculum-by-subject-and-year architecture built properly, the item most sites miss, rather than a single generic curriculum page.
  • Trust-level documents wired to every academy’s site for a multi-academy trust, so the funding agreement, articles, and register of interests are findable from anywhere in the trust.
  • A clear paper-copy route stated on the publication index.

The school keeps ownership of the content: the policies, the ethos, the SEN report are a leadership exercise the headteacher, SENCO, and governors lead on. Custodiance provides the architecture, the dating discipline, and the calendar, and holds them so the list stays complete between inspections.

This is the floor of a Growth engagement (£1,495/mo). A multi-academy trust with several schools, or a school that wants a fractional CTO owning the roadmap and the compliance posture, is an Embedded engagement (from £6,000/mo, bespoke).

Frequently asked questions

Is there a single law that lists what a school website must publish?

No. The requirement is assembled from the Department for Education’s statutory publication guidance (one page for maintained schools, one for academies and colleges) sitting on top of underlying legislation, the SEN regulations, the Education Act 2002, the Education and Inspections Act 2006, and others. The DfE guidance is the practical index most schools work from; verify the current version, because the DfE updates it.

We are an academy. What do we publish that a maintained school does not?

Chiefly the governance and financial-transparency documents that flow from being a charitable company: the funding agreement and supplemental agreements, the memorandum and articles, the names of members and trustees, the scheme of delegation, the register of business and financial interests, and the trust’s audited annual report and accounts by 31 January. Your complaints procedure is measured against the independent school standards regulations rather than section 29.

The list is long. Which items do schools most often miss?

In our audits, three recur: the curriculum published by subject and by academic year (most sites carry only a general curriculum statement); a date-driven statement left a year stale (commonly the pupil premium or the PE and sport premium); and, for academies, trust-level governance documents that exist somewhere but are not findable from the individual school’s site. All three are structural, and all three are fixable once rather than annually.

Does publishing this information create a data-protection problem?

It can, if handled carelessly, which is why the publication duty and the data-protection duty have to be run together. Governor details are published to a defined extent; pupil and family data are not. Naming a child in a celebratory news item, or leaving a photo up without current consent, is a data-protection issue even where the underlying publication is required. The residency and pupil-data side is covered in the pupil data-protection briefing, and the DfE’s own view is set out in its data protection in schools guidance.

Where this fits

The safeguarding-facing side of the same website, the DSL contact, the reporting route, and the filtering and monitoring statement, is set out in KCSIE and your school website. The pupil-data and forms side is pupil data protection: UK GDPR for schools, and the accessibility duty that touches the administrative parts of the site is public-sector accessibility for school websites. The KCSIE-anchored publication checklist is the KCSIE school website audit checklist, and the residency-gap overview is why your UK school’s website probably fails KCSIE. The published posture behind all of it is the Custodiance framework, and the overview for schools is Custodiance for schools. When a school is ready, the next step is to request a scoping call.

Sources & methodology

The publication items are drawn item by item from the Department for Education’s two statutory publication-guidance pages, with the underlying legislation cited where a specific duty is named. The lists are updated by the DfE from time to time; treat this as a map to verify, not a substitute for the current guidance.

Sources

  1. What maintained schools must publish online - Department for Education
  2. What academies, free schools and colleges should publish online - Department for Education
  3. The Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014, Schedule 1 - legislation.gov.uk
  4. Complaints procedure: section 29, Education Act 2002 - legislation.gov.uk
  5. Data protection in schools - Department for Education

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