In an effort to keep up with changes from the Department for Education - and let’s be honest, there are plenty of them - I subscribe to updates from the DfE website. It means scouring through plenty of irrelevant emails (apprenticeships data, anyone?), but it’s just about the only way of being sure that the department won’t have changed something without me noticing.

During half-term, there were no fewer than 65 update emails, with more than half of them coming on Thursday alone. In among all the usual bumph of statistics publications and technical specifications, one jumped out at me: “What schools must publish online.” These web pages are the bane of my life, as a headteacher, and knowing that the requirement had been changed yet again filled me with dread.

Thankfully, this particular change was a minor tweak to the wording, so nothing new that needed to be added, but like headteachers everywhere, I am continually reminded that it’s not enough to run a good school and educate children well - now we must also publish umpteen documents online, never to be read, but to be closely scrutinised when Ofsted arrives.

I’m sure the argument the DfE would make is that it focuses schools’ attentions on the important areas of their work. But in truth, is anyone paying any attention to anything but the most-likely-to-be-inspected elements? I’ve never had a parent ask me about how we spend our PE and sport premium, but publish a report we must. I’ve often wondered whether anyone ever downloads the reports on our website.

Time is short

What’s worse is that the requirements are becoming so onerous that they’re beginning to defeat the point. Like so many other heads, time is short, so when I want to update a policy or document, I tend to refer to other schools in my trust for an example to start from. Clearly, lots of other heads do the same, but make a mistake: I’ve seen more than one website with an access statement or some other such report that clearly refers to the wrong school at some point.

In truth, having all these documents online doesn’t make schools any better at delivering things, and it certainly doesn’t make it any more likely that we will be held to account by the supposed stakeholders. Parents - quite rightly - aren’t usually interested in how Year 7 catch-up funding was spent, or what the average score was for Year 6 pupils in the reading test. They want to see how the school will support their children to achieve and enjoy life at school.

Some of the requirements are truly bizarre. Schools are now required to publish on their websites the name of the person who deals with queries from parents and the public. What does that even mean? In some schools, there might be a whole team of people who answer telephones or email queries. Different queries would be directed to different teams. Does everyone’s name need to be published?

At my school, it’s probably the school secretary, unless she’s at lunch or has gone home, or maybe she’s dealing with a first-aid case. Or maybe I just happen to be standing next to the phone when it rings. In a small school, the person who deals with queries is the person who happens to be available at the time. It seems that the only advantage to publishing one person’s name online is to allow cold callers to pretend that they’re not just cold calling!

Anyway, I can’t carry on here - I’m off to check how many Year 6s can swim so I can publish it online for no one to look at.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979