Why schools’ websites should be a major trust concern

This article was originally published on 15 March 2024

A school website is something of a Swiss army knife when it comes to how many functions it has to perform.

It must be a shop window for prospective parents and their children; a source of information for the existing school community, from providing dates for the diary to access to behaviour or attendance policies; host numerous information that must legally be made available; and represent the school and its ethos.

Setting the website up, maintaining it and keeping it secure requires cost, time and energy. This is a challenge for a single school but even more so for a multi-academy trust operating at scale.

This is something that Adrian Ball, CEO of the 40-school Diocese of Ely Multi Academy Trust (DEMAT), knows well, having overseen a transformation of his trust’s schools’ websites after identifying that they were “outdated” and didn’t match the wider development of the trust.

“We had done a lot of work around being a family of schools and the concept of alignment, and we’d seen huge successes in our Ofsted outcomes since updating our curriculum. But this work wasn’t represented in how we showed ourselves publicly,” he says.

Each school was running its own website, so there was a huge range of quality in terms of style and the content being presented.

“We’d ended up with 13 or 14 different providers doing a handful of schools, and some schools did it themselves with their own domain that they had bought years before. Some sites were working well but many had less in-depth and less accurate information”.

Moving to a single-school website provider

Even where sites were well-maintained, Ball says, in smaller schools, it required a lot of effort from staff to manage contracts, look after the website and keep it secure - and all this time could be better spent focusing on education.

Headteachers in the trust recognised these issues, too, such as Beccy Ireland-Curtis, of St Luke’s CofE Primary in Cambridge.

“When I arrived at St Luke’s, the website was one of the concerns raised by the community, as they felt it didn’t reflect either the school or the trust and there were concerns about compliance,” she says.

For these reasons, the trust decided to embark on a migration to a single website supplier for all of its schools - a project that took about a year in total, from the selection of a provider in summer 2022 to the first site going live in January 2023, before all sites migrated last summer.

This has brought numerous benefits, Ball explains: “There’s a cost saving but the main factor is about reducing the workload for schools. And now if you look across our websites there’s a similar template and theme, with the same layout.”

There is still some website customisation that each school can do - choosing colour schemes, images, logos and so forth - but the overall layout is the same, something that Ball says is key in helping to monitor compliance with Department for Education website requirements.

“If we know that every page looks exactly the same, It’s much quicker for the governance team to find those pages and see what is and what isn’t meeting the necessary thresholds,” he says.

Customisation for individual schools

Another trust that has seen similar benefits with this approach is Truro and Penwith Academy Trust (TPAT) in Cornwall.

Formed of 34 schools, the trust had 10 different website providers, plus “some schools who had used a parent’s brother or someone’s uncle who knew a bit about website building 10 years ago”, says TPAT digital transformation lead Martin Higgs.

Similar to DEMAT, the trust wanted to rationalise by using a single supplier to host all of its websites, bringing consistency and ease of use to staff, Higgs says. The other important aim was to allow the trust central team to update pages across all sites, again helping to ensure compliance with the DfE’s requirements.

Higgs says that customisation to suit each school’s context is key: for example, while original designs from the provider were fine for primaries, they were not “grown-up” enough for its secondary schools. However, the supplier built new templates that were suitable.

David Clayton, CEO at six-school Endeavour Learning Trust, agrees that because all schools are unique, their websites - even when taken from a single provider - should have an element of customisation.

“We aim to strike the balance between recognising each school’s individuality and unique context while having a cohesive ‘look and feel’ across our school websites to show that we are a family,” he says.

This is why Endeavour chose a website provider that offered a variety of “colour schemes, branding and content” around its standard layout.

Autonomy and agency

However, not every trust has gone down the single supplier route, with some preferring instead to allow their schools to proceed as suits them best, with central support if required.

Matthew Kleiner-Mann, CEO of Ivy Learning Trust, which has 14 schools, says: “We encourage our schools to best serve their local community in their own way, and so each website can have a different look and feel.

“However, we also know how essential it is for schools to have engaging, informative and compliant websites, and we offer comprehensive support and advice to our schools on this.”

A similar approach has been taken at Bradford Diocesan Academies Trust (BDAT) for its 19 schools.

Claire Berry, director of corporate affairs at BDAT, says letting schools manage their own sites helps to “retain and promote their unique identity”. Each school chooses a provider based on its “resources, the expertise of its staff and the functions needed by its pupil and parent community”.

More content for MAT leaders

• Small schools at risk: Small schools are on the brink. Are MATs the answer?
• MAT strategy: Has your trust got its strategy right?
• Leadership: When should MATs start consolidating systems?

Steve Mulligan, headteacher of Immanuel College, which is part of BDAT, says this is a stance he has welcomed. “One of the great benefits of being a member of a trust like BDAT is being able to retain a great deal of autonomy,” he says.

This does not mean that the trust has no involvement at all in its schools’ websites, though. The central team carry out regular website compliance checks throughout the year to ensure that sites link to key BDAT policies and meet DfE requirements.

Overcoming leader concerns

Ball acknowledges that while most school leaders were on board with his trust’s switch to a single website supplier, some did question what they saw as a loss of control.

“With the number of schools we have, we did have some who were very wedded to existing websites and providers, and said, ‘This is what our parents know, this is what they are used to,’” he says. “So there was some change-management work to be done with a small group of staff.”

DEMAT worked with those schools to discuss the change and the benefits it would offer - and Ireland-Curtis says she saw those benefits immediately.

“Having the websites partially managed by the trust, concerning statutory policies, takes a significant amount of workload off me. This allows me to focus on the key areas of teaching and learning rather than having to regularly undertake compliance checks,” she says.

Aligning contracts

One of the more difficult hurdles to overcome, in centralising to one provider, is getting existing contracts to align to a single termination date.

Ball at DEMAT chose to end existing contracts early where required, feeling that it was worth the costs this incurred to accelerate the trust’s move to more structured website provision.

However, for Phili Jones, marketing and business support at Inspiring Futures Through Learning (IFtL), a 16-school trust in the Midlands, ending schools’ contracts early has not been possible, so the trust has been looking at other ways to ensure a similar look and feel across its websites.

“We are working towards a stage where all schools will be required to prominently display the IFtL logo on their webpages, and as new schools join the trust, they are required to add our logo to their websites,” she says.

Nonetheless, it is clear where the trust intends to be. “We would like all our schools to be managed and maintained by the same provider,” Jones adds.

For others, though, like BDAT, the decision to keep website choice in the hands of individual schools is unlikely to be changed soon - although Berry notes that it is an area where the trust remains open-minded.

“Our current system works well but we regularly review this, and, should there be a desire in the future to move to a centrally managed system, we would be happy to explore this option,” she says.

If BDAT - or, indeed, any other trust - does go down that path in the future, there will clearly be numerous other trusts out there that have done so already and will therefore have plenty of insight and guidance on what works well.

For the latest education news and analysis delivered directly to your inbox every weekday morning, sign up to the Tes Daily newsletter