Website compliance · ISSR 2014
Built for the regime you're actually inspected under
The first automated website-compliance check for the Independent School Standards — ISSR 2014, as applied by ISI and Ofsted. Not a repackaged state-school checklist.
Illustrative preview — your review reflects your live website
The problem
You're inspected against a different rulebook
Independent schools are held to the Independent School Standards (ISSR 2014), applied by ISI and Ofsted — not the DfE publication lists that bind maintained schools and academies.
Those duties are spread across dozens of pages and PDFs, and the rules keep moving — VAT on fees, the 2026 ISSR amendments.
Checking by hand is slow, and a gap usually only surfaces once an inspector finds it.
Generic checkers audit
DfE publication lists
Maintained schools & academies — not the standards you're held to.
Signal Layer audits
The Independent School Standards
ISSR 2014 as ISI and Ofsted actually apply it.
The distinction
We grade the way the law actually reads
Paragraph 32 of the Schedule puts four things on the website: the safeguarding particulars (32(1)(c)), the latest inspection report (32(1)(d)), the boarding-welfare report for boarding schools (32(1)(e)), and particulars of any DfE regulatory action (32(1)(j)).
The two inspection reports carry no such fallback — the duty is conditional only on a report having been sent to the proprietor. The other two fall back to “on request” or “to parents” only where a school has no website — and every school reading this has one. We don't fail a school on a keyword miss for those: they go to your reviewer with what we found.
Everything else in paragraph 32 — contact and proprietor details, admissions, behaviour, the curriculum, results — is a duty to provide to parents, which a school may lawfully meet off-website. So where one of those is missing from your site, we flag it for review, not mark the school as failing.
Fail is reserved for findings of fact: an inspection report missing or linked to a dead domain, a page served without HTTPS, no privacy policy. A duty the Standards let you meet off the website is marked Needs review, not Fail. A page we could not reach is marked unreached, not passed.
What we will fail a school for
Latest inspection report — missing, or linked to a dead domain
ISSR Sch. para 32(1)(d)
Boarding-welfare report linked to a dead domain
A missing one goes to Needs attention — for many association schools the judgement sits inside the main ISI report.
ISSR Sch. para 32(1)(e)
A page served over plain http, or no privacy policy at all
Web fundamentals · UK GDPR / DPA · NCSC
Everything else, if missing
What we check
Everything your report covers
A working product, versioned and growing — run against your live site and your PDFs, and graded the way the law actually reads. Reports are versioned, so each one compares like-for-like with the last.
48
Checks in the catalogue
The ones your school doesn't have — boarding, early years — are marked Not applicable, never counted against you.
38
Automated
Definitive and AI-assisted, read from your pages and PDFs — all live now.
10
Guided on-site
A structured checklist for what only an inspector sees on-site.
Every check is automated (a confident pass or fail), AI-assisted (graded against the regulation's wording, never failed on absence), or a guided on-site item — and lands on one of these:
Pass — verified on the website
Needs attention — found but incomplete or stale
Needs review — not found — not a breach
Fail — the inspection report, or a web fundamental such as HTTPS
Not applicable — boarding & early-years only
Guided manual checklist — assessed on-site
01 · Independent School Standards
The website-detectable subset of the Schedule
The paragraph-32 provision-of-information duties, the Part 7 complaints requirements, and the published inspection report.
- Inspection & boarding-welfare reports published
- Contact, proprietor and ethos details
- Admissions, behaviour, curriculum, EHC/EAL, results
- Complaints procedure — Part 7
| Check | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Latest inspection report published | Sch. 32(1)(d) |
| Contact details & head's name | Sch. 32(2)(a) |
| Proprietor details | Sch. 32(2)(b)–(c) |
| Admissions policy available | Sch. 32(3)(a) |
| Complaints procedure available | Sch. 33 & 32(3)(f) |
02 · Company, charity & consumer-law disclosures
Labelled with their real statutory basis — not dressed up as ISSR
Duties most independent schools carry from company, charity and consumer law — kept honest and distinct from the school-standards checks.
Company trading disclosures
Registered name, number, place of registration and office. Unincorporated schools: not applicable.
Companies Act 2006 s.82 · SI 2015/17
Charitable-status disclosure
Charitable schools state their status; fundraising pages carry the registered-charity statement.
Charities Act 2011
Newly relevant
VAT-inclusive fee transparency
Headline fees quoted VAT-inclusive, with no drip-pricing of mandatory extras — squarely relevant since VAT applied to school fees.
DMCC Act 2024 · CMA guidance, Dec 2025
Accessibility plan discoverability
The Equality Act plan is discoverable. The duty is to have it, not publish it — routes to Needs review, never a fail.
Equality Act 2010, Sch. 10
03 · Statutory policy currency
17 policies — visible, and in date
We pull in the policy documents themselves — the PDFs, not just the links — and read each one: is the named policy published, and does it state a recent review date? Found & current is a pass; stale or undated needs attention; missing routes to review, never a failure.
A point of precision
The FOI check that binds state schools is switched off — the FOI Act applies to public authorities, and independent schools are not among them. So you're never chased for a duty you don't carry.
17 checks · all live
KCSIE · UK GDPR · DfE
- Safeguarding / child protection
- Staff code of conduct
- Whistleblowing
- Privacy notice
- Medical conditions
- Educational visits
- Attendance
- Anti-bullying
- EYFS (if applicable)
- Online safety
- Managing allegations
- Data protection
- Health & safety
- First aid
- Non-attendance (health)
- Suspensions & exclusions
- SEND
04 · Web fundamentals
The baseline every website owes its visitors
Four checks, all live.
Definitive
HTTPS everywhere
Every crawled page served securely — no “Not secure” warning.
UK GDPR / DPA · NCSC
Definitive
Privacy policy published
A privacy policy is reachable on the website.
UK GDPR Arts 13–14
Definitive
ICO registration disclosed
The school's ICO data-protection reference is disclosed.
DP (Charges) Regs 2018
AI-assisted
Cookie consent
Informed consent before non-essential cookies; refusing is as easy as accepting.
PECR 2003 · ICO
Signature check
The broken inspection-report link
Many independent schools last linked their inspection report years ago — to a legacy ISI reports domain that no longer serves reports.
The link text still says “Inspection report”, so a manual spot-check passes it. We verify the destination, catch the dead domain, and flag it as the live broken statutory link it is.
As of our own review of the market in July 2026, no other automated check does this.
Link text reads
“Read our latest inspection report”
manual spot-check → looks fine
We follow the destination
How schools use it
Run once a year, re-checked about once a term
Most schools run the full report ahead of the inspection window or the autumn website refresh — then let the platform re-check automatically, about once a term by default.
A policy that quietly lapses or a link that breaks is caught at the next re-check, not by an inspector.
Reports are versioned — each re-check compares like-for-like with the one before, and a change in the rules is marked as a rules change, not as your website slipping. Governors get a clean audit trail.
Every flagged check comes with plain-English guidance. The pack assembles the fixes into a single Word document — with draft wording built from your own uploaded policies, never invented.
Who it's for
For every independent school in England — prep to senior, day to boarding.
Charitable or proprietorial, ISI- or Ofsted-inspected — the report adapts to your school. Boarding and early-years checks appear only if they apply, and never count against you if they don't.
School groups
One rulebook, many schools — and no single view of it
A group of independent schools — from a pair of preps to a national estate — carries the same paragraph-32 duties at every school, and each school is inspected on its own. In practice each website is checked by a different person, on a different day, against a different reading of the Schedule.
So the group-level questions go unanswered: which schools still link a live inspection report, whose safeguarding policy is out of date, where a boarding-welfare report is missing. Each head finds out at their own inspection.
We run the same report, against the same catalogue version, at every school in the group — so the results read the same way from school to school, and the fixes can be sequenced rather than discovered.
For groups and estates
Tell us which schools
£399 + VAT per school per year is the reference point. For a group we agree the arrangement with you directly — which schools, the boarding and early-years mix, and who receives each report — rather than through a self-serve checkout.
Get in touch about a groupPricing
One price, everything included
Per school, per year
- Independent School Standards report (ISSR 2014)
- Statutory-policies report — 17 checks
- Company, charity & consumer-law disclosures
- Web fundamentals
- Accessibility report — WCAG 2.2 AA (good practice)
- Automatic re-checks, about once a term
- Remediation pack, drafted from your own documents
Free review to start · no card · advisers working across many schools — get in touch for a plan that fits
See exactly where your website stands
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hello@signal-layer.ai