Web Design for Schools and Training ProvidersWeb Design for Schools and Training Providers

What usually goes wrong in schools and training providers

State-funded schools in England have a statutory list of information their website must publish — admissions arrangements, curriculum detail, the latest Ofsted report, performance measures, the pupil premium strategy, the SEN information report, safeguarding and complaints policies, governance, equality objectives. Most schools do publish all of it, and most publish it as a wall of PDFs behind a menu item called Key Information. Technically compliant, practically unfindable, and invisible to search.

Accessibility is a legal duty here rather than a nice-to-have, though a more carefully bounded one than it is often described as. Schools are public sector bodies under the accessibility regulations and must publish an accessibility statement, but they are partially exempt: the requirement bites on the content people need in order to use the service rather than on every page on the site. That exemption is narrower than it sounds, because admissions arrangements, term dates, policies and forms are exactly the content families need to use the school. A site built on scanned PDFs, images of text and colour-only links fails them, and this is the sector where that is least defensible — the audience includes the families least able to work around it.

And the daily reality is a parent on a phone at eight in the morning wanting the term dates, the absence line, the uniform list or last week’s letter. That is the overwhelming majority of real traffic to a school site and it is usually three taps further away than the prospectus. Training providers have the same shape of problem with course dates, entry requirements and funding eligibility.

What transfers, and what does not

The nearest comparable work is Charis Aesthetics: 162 pages, built so that the things the regulator cares about are in the markup rather than in a PDF, and taken from roughly three per cent of pages indexed to eighty per cent within a week of launch. A school site is the same problem — a large number of pages that must be both compliant and findable — with a different rulebook.

The page-speed discipline transfers too. That build loads completely in 0.38 seconds from 29 requests against a previous site making 193. A parent on a bad signal in a school car park is a harsher test than a laptop on office wifi, and it is the test that matters.

What this page cannot show is a school. There is no education client yet, and the statutory list above is published guidance rather than something we have been inspected against.

What you get, and what it costs

The same three numbers as every other page on this site: from £500 for the build, from £50 a month for hosting and care, and growth blocks from £250 a month when you want the site to earn more. No setup fee, no management fee, no percentage of ad spend, no minimum term.

• A bespoke build rather than a page-builder assembly, so it is fast on a phone rather than fast on your laptop.
• A page for each thing you actually sell and each place you sell it, so every search a customer might run has somewhere of its own to land.
• Editable by you, with a walkthrough at handover.
• The domain in your name and the hosting in your account, with a full working copy if you ever leave.
• Tracking that counts phone taps as well as forms, because in most sectors the phone is the majority of enquiries.