The school website often crops up in my conversations with school leaders, mainly as part of their questions about what inspectors will look for and whether their website is compliant. However, I would suggest that before the inspection focus, it’s useful to consider other aspects of a school website.
After all, pleasing or displeasing Mrs HMI is not the main purpose of the school’s website. It’s a source of information for parents and children; a place to celebrate the school and the children’s achievements and, let’s be honest, a PR tool to attract the new intake.
I realise that school leaders have a million and one, oh wait… no, a million and two… hang on… something else now? ... make that a million and three things to do, but if the website needs a bit of TLC, I thought I’d share a few points.
So, with my experience of looking at many, many a school website as a consultant, as a former inspector, and as someone who dabbled in designing websites commercially many, many years ago, here are some suggestions to consider:
o Is the website easy to navigate? Can you find key information within three clicks of the homepage? If not, consider simplifying things, or people will give up looking. Think about the last time you tried to find something on an unfamiliar website and couldn’t. How long before you muttered a rude word and returned to Google results?
o Check the website works on phones. It should be optimised for viewing on phone screens, and commercial firms will ensure this, but some schools use a friend of the office manager’s child’s partner’s neighbour to build their website. The site might look and work fine on a laptop but how many parents will look at the website on a large screen, let alone try to scroll down a tiny-weeny drop-down menu to click on a link now invisible to the human eye?
o Speaking of drop-down menus, if I had a pound for every school website I’ve visited where a drop-down menu disappears off the bottom of the screen when viewed at 100% zoom on a browser, I’d be writing this on a much higher spec, and much newer, laptop. (Actually, I wouldn’t because I would have spent the money on old books and vinyl records, but you get the idea.) Does a drop-down menu really need so many links? Who is going to notice the ones that are missing?
o Check the website works with different browsers. Again, commercial companies will (at least they should) ensure this is the case, but perhaps not if a friend of a friend built the site.
o Check for out-of-date content. We all know from looking at websites for hobbies, shopping, eating out, holidays, etc., that out-of-date content puts you off and gives a poor impression of the company or venue. I suggest it’s probably better to have little or nothing on a class page rather than pictures of the work the children who are now in Y11 did when they were in Y2.
As for the website compliance with DfE expectations, it may help to ask a governor or two to take this on initially. As they are not involved in the day-to-day running of the school, nor are they normally involved in adding and removing website content, they can provide that challenge and support.
And for the things that an inspector will focus on where they look at the website as part of their inspection preparation, I’ve recently produced a ‘Preparing for inspection – the school website on-demand training video for Focus Education that might be useful for school leaders. This is part of a series of videos to help leaders prepare for inspection.
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Find out more about our school website review service we offer. This review service is carried out by one of our consultants, who has considerable inspection experience. It provides a ‘fresh pair of eyes’ to ensure your school website meets statutory criteria and provides the information an inspector would expect to find. (This is also included in our Leadership Club Level 2 completely free).
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