What must actually be published #
The DfE's guidance on what maintained schools must publish online, last updated on 24 October 2024, lists sixteen categories.
The sixteen categories
- Admission arrangements for foundation and voluntary-aided schools
- The behaviour policy
- Careers programme information in secondary
- Charging and remissions policies
- The complaints policy
- Contact details
- Curriculum content for every subject and year
- Financial information, including employee salary bands over one hundred thousand pounds
- Governance information
- The most recent Ofsted report
- Pay gap reporting for schools with 250 or more employees
- PE and sport premium, where received
- Public sector equality duty information and objectives
- The pupil premium strategy statement
- The SEND information report
- Test, exam and assessment results
None of those is difficult in itself. The difficulty is that they have different owners, different review cycles and different sources, and nothing in a school automatically notices that one of them has gone stale. Most schools find out during an audit or a website check, which is the expensive way to find out.
The board pack is a reformatting job #
A termly governors' pack typically contains attendance, attainment, behaviour, admissions and roll numbers, safeguarding, staffing, finance and a headteacher's report. Almost every figure in it already exists somewhere else, usually in a report that was produced for the leadership team a few weeks earlier in a different layout.
So the pack gets rebuilt by hand, every term, by somebody senior. The Workload Reduction Taskforce's January 2024 list of 23 administrative tasks that should not require a teacher includes, at item 20, taking, copying, distributing or typing up notes or producing formal minutes, and at item 2, reformatting data or re-entry of data into multiple systems. A board pack is usually both at once.
Inspection changed, and so did what is worth preparing #
Ofsted's previous school inspection handbook under the education inspection framework was withdrawn on 10 November 2025 and replaced by a toolkit and operating guides.
The DfE's guidance on understanding Ofsted report cards, published on 1 December 2025, describes colour-coded grades across separate evaluation areas, with safeguarding judged met or not met. Ofsted is explicit that the new grades cannot be compared with the old ones.
The evaluation areas and the five point scale
The separate evaluation areas include attendance and behaviour, achievement, personal development and wellbeing, and inclusion. The grades run on a five point scale from exceptional through strong standard, expected standard and needs attention to urgent improvement.
There is a direct workload consequence. Item 4 on the taskforce list is the creation or duplication of files and paperwork perceived to be required in anticipation of inspection, such as copies of evidence portfolios or regularly updated seating plans.
The other consequence is sharper. Some attendance data now reaches Ofsted through the DfE's daily collection rather than through anything the school submits. That shifts the value of effort away from preparing a presentation of the data and towards making sure the data is right at the point it is entered.
Which parts run on rules #
The assembly and the watching. What needs a person is every word of narrative around the numbers.
The assembly and the watching
- A register of every required publication, with an owner, a source and a review date, and something that says when one is overdue
- A board pack whose standing figures are produced from the systems that hold them rather than retyped from another report
- A check that the version on the website matches the version that was approved
All of that has a fixed trigger, fixed steps and a fixed output.
Every word of narrative around the numbers
- What the attendance fall means
- Which risk the board should be told about first
- How to explain a difficult set of results honestly without losing the room
Governance is a judgement exercise supported by data.
The point of getting the data assembly onto rails is that the judgement gets the time instead of the formatting.
The cost of admin time calculator will price the termly rebuild. The page next door is attendance returns and reporting, which is where most of the board pack's numbers come from.