A website check was only the beginning.
One teacher's workload became a much bigger question.
How a conversation in Bolton grew into work on policies, trust-wide oversight and the destinations behind website links.
The backstory
A few hours, every week.
A teacher in Bolton, who was also the school's IT lead, told us how much time went into maintaining the school website and its policies. It was not a one-off tidy-up. It was a few hours of work that came back every week.
We contacted other schools to find out whether the same problem existed elsewhere. One had already bought a website-auditing tool. It helped with part of the job, but the wider workload remained. The question became: what would actually take work off the school's plate?
Version 1
Start with the missing policies
Can we check that the required policies are there?
We started with a focused tool for maintained primary schools: check whether the required policies could be found on the website. It gave us something useful to test with schools, and a concrete way to learn what the first version still missed.
What it taught usBuild a useful first step, then learn from the work it leaves behind.
Version 2
Check more than presence
A policy link exists. But does it work, and does the policy cover what it should?
The next version added broken-link checks and checks against the policy requirements for maintained schools. A tick beside a document's name was not enough. Schools needed help finding the gaps inside the material, as well as the gaps in the website menu.
What it taught usA document being present does not establish that it meets a requirement.
Version 3
Think across a whole trust
How do we manage this across all our schools, and keep track of review dates?
Work with a large multi-academy trust widened the brief. We began building for oversight across multiple schools and tracking policy review dates. That is a different problem from checking one maintained primary website, with different governance and publication requirements to account for.
What it taught usDo not stretch one school's checklist into a trust-wide solution without revisiting the brief.
Version 4October 2026
A working link can still be the wrong link
What happens when a link still opens, but its destination has been hijacked?
Through this work, we discovered hijacked links. A successful page load could look reassuring while leading somewhere the school had never intended. That finding exposed a limit of simple broken-link checking and added a new question to the work: can the destination still be trusted?
What it taught usA technical success response is not proof that a link is safe or appropriate.
Why this matters
The first version is a starting point.
We test an idea against the real job, find out where it falls short and change it. That means being willing to discard an assumption quickly, rather than asking a school to work around it indefinitely.
Explore the website auditAutomated checks help schools identify issues for review. They are not legal advice, a guarantee of statutory compliance or a complete website security assessment.