What must be published
Taken from the Department for Education’s guidance for maintained schools, read on 4 October 2026. Academies and free schools have a parallel set of requirements through their funding agreements, which overlap heavily but are not identical.
- Admission arrangements. Foundation and voluntary-aided schools publish their own; community and voluntary-controlled schools link to the local authority’s.
- Behaviour policy, complying with section 89 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006.
- Charging and remissions policies — which activities carry a charge and when it is waived.
- Complaints policy, including the arrangements for complaints about SEN provision.
- Contact details: postal address, telephone number, and the name of the member of staff who deals with queries from parents, carers and the public.
- Curriculum: the content taught in each subject, together with the accessibility plan.
- Financial information, including employee salary information and a link to the schools financial benchmarking service.
- Governance information about the governing body and its committees.
- The most recent Ofsted report, as a copy or a link.
- Public sector equality duty information and the school’s equality objectives.
- Pupil premium strategy statement, explaining the spending and the outcomes.
- The SEND information report.
- Test, exam and assessment results, with a link to the performance comparison service.
Three further items are required only in particular circumstances: careers programme information including the name and contact details of the careers lead, for secondary schools; gender pay gap information, for schools with 250 or more employees; and PE and sport premium funding and impact, for schools receiving it.
What is recommended, not required
The DfE guidance also covers several things it recommends rather than requires. They are worth publishing and they are not a compliance failure if absent, and a guide that presents them as mandatory is doing schools no favours.
- A statement of the school’s ethos and values.
- Information about remote education provision.
- School opening hours, including start and finish times and the total weekly duration.
- The school uniform policy.
In practice the recommended four are among the most-wanted pages on any school site — a parent looking for term dates or uniform rules is a far commoner visitor than one reading the equality objectives. The hierarchy of what the law requires and the hierarchy of what parents need are close to inverted, which is the central design problem of a school website.
Published is not the same as findable
Schools that fall short rarely fail to publish. They publish everything, as PDFs, behind a menu item called Key Information, and consider the duty discharged.
The guidance is explicit that a school without its own website must publish the information on an alternative website and give parents a link, and that a paper copy should be provided free of charge on request. Both point the same way: this is information intended to reach people, not to exist.
- A policy as a scanned PDF is an image. It cannot be read aloud by a screen reader, searched, or sensibly read on a phone.
- A PDF is also poorly read by search engines, so a parent searching your school plus "term dates" may not find the page at all.
- Information published only as an attachment goes stale, because updating it means finding whoever holds the file.
- A page three clicks down a menu called Key Information is compliant and invisible.
The practical fix is the same one that helps every other reader: the required information as real pages, with a PDF kept alongside where somebody genuinely needs to print or archive it.
The accessibility duty, stated accurately
This is the part most often misdescribed, usually in the direction of making it sound broader than it is.
Public sector bodies have had to meet accessibility standards and publish an accessibility statement since 23 September 2018. The standard named in the current GOV.UK guidance is WCAG 2.2 AA. Schools are public sector bodies for these purposes — and they are partially exempt.
The exemption means a school is not required to make all of its content accessible. What it must make accessible is the content people need in order to use its services; GOV.UK gives the example of a form that lets a parent set out school meal preferences.
That is genuinely narrower than "the whole site must be WCAG compliant", and this guide says so rather than overstating the duty. It is also narrower than it sounds in practice, because admissions arrangements, term dates, letters, policies and forms are precisely the content families need in order to use the school. The exemption removes the archive of newsletters from the obligation; it does not remove the pages that matter.
The accessibility statement itself is a requirement rather than a courtesy, it must explain how accessible the site is, and it should be reviewed and updated. An honest statement naming what still fails is worth more than a clean one that is not true.
The site parents actually use
Everything above is the floor. The site above it serves one dominant user: a parent on a phone, usually in a hurry, usually in the morning.
Term dates. Absence reporting. Uniform. This week’s letter. The lunch menu. Those are the overwhelming majority of real traffic to a school website and they are typically further from the homepage than the prospectus is.
A school site that puts those five things one tap from the homepage, as pages rather than attachments, has solved most of what it is actually for — and has, incidentally, made the content that families need in order to use the school accessible, which is what the regulations ask.
Training providers have the same shape of problem with a different vocabulary: course dates, entry requirements and funding eligibility are the three things every visitor arrives for, and they are usually buried under the organisational story.
