School Website Accessibility: What the Regulations Actually Require

School website accessibility

The short answer

School websites in England sit under two sets of rules. The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 make schools partially exempt: you do not have to bring the whole site up to standard, but the content people need in order to use your services must be accessible, and you must publish an accessibility statement. Underneath that, the Equality Act 2010 duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people applies to every school in full.

The standard both point to is WCAG 2.2 level AA. In practice, meeting it on a school website means readable text, proper headings, alt text on images, forms that work from a keyboard, video with captions, and policies that are not locked inside scanned PDFs. This guide explains what the rules require, what you can leave, and a one-hour audit you can run yourself.

What the regulations say

The regulations came into force for public sector bodies on 23 September 2018. They require websites to be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, which are the four principles of WCAG, and they require an accessibility statement that explains how accessible the site is and what is being done about the gaps. The Government Digital Service monitors compliance by sampling public sector websites each year and can ask any body for information.

Schools are listed as partially exempt alongside nurseries. GOV.UK’s own example of the content that is not exempt is a form that lets parents give school meal preferences: if a family has to use it to get a service from you, it has to work for everyone. Admissions forms, consent forms, absence reporting, payment links and the information that explains how to use them all fall into the same category.

What partially exempt means in practice

Being partially exempt does not mean doing nothing. Read it as three obligations:

• Anything a parent, pupil or member of the public needs in order to use a school service must meet WCAG 2.2 AA
• An accessibility statement must be published and kept up to date
• Reasonable adjustments must be made under the Equality Act 2010 whenever someone needs them, for example providing a policy in large print or as an accessible document on request

Everything else on the site, the news archive, the gallery, the old newsletters, is where the exemption bites. You are still expected to try, and you are expected to say in your statement what you have not done and why.

WCAG 2.2 AA in plain English

WCAG is long, but most of what matters on a school website comes down to a dozen habits:

• Text that can be resized and still read, with enough contrast against its background
• A real heading structure: one H1, then H2s and H3s in order, so screen reader users can jump around the page
• Alt text on every meaningful image, and empty alt text on decorative ones
• Links that make sense on their own (“Download the behaviour policy”, not “click here”)
• Every button and form field reachable and usable with the keyboard alone
• Visible focus so keyboard users can see where they are
• Form fields with proper labels and clear error messages
• Captions on videos and transcripts for audio
• No content that flashes, and nothing that moves without a way to stop it
• Pages that still work when zoomed to 200 percent and on a phone
• Documents published as web pages or accessible PDFs, not scans
• A consistent menu so nobody has to relearn the site on every page

WCAG 2.2 added a handful of criteria to 2.1, including focus not being hidden behind sticky headers, larger click targets and not making people redo things they have already entered. A modern, well-built template handles most of this for you; the things schools have to keep doing themselves are alt text, headings, link wording and documents.

The accessibility statement

The statement is a public page, usually linked from the footer, that says how accessible the site is, which parts are not, why, and when you plan to fix them. GOV.UK publishes a sample statement to adapt. It needs a date, a contact route for anyone who cannot access something, and a note on how to escalate to the Equality Advisory and Support Service.

If you decide some fixes would be a disproportionate burden, the regulations require an actual assessment weighing the cost and impact on the school against the benefit to disabled users. Lack of time, knowledge or priority does not count. Cheap fixes with wide benefit, GOV.UK’s own example is colour contrast, are very unlikely to qualify.

The PDF problem

The single biggest accessibility failure on school websites is the document library. Scanned policies are images, not text, so a screen reader gets nothing. Even born-digital PDFs from Word are often untagged. The DfE now says PE and sport premium reports downloaded from the digital form must be converted to HTML, and the same logic applies to the pupil premium statement, the SEN information report and anything else parents rely on.

The fix is to publish the annual statutory items as web pages and keep PDFs for genuinely document-shaped things such as a signed policy, and to make those PDFs from the source file with headings and tags rather than from the scanner. Our guide to what schools must publish online lists which items those are.

Things you do not have to fix

The regulations exempt some content outright, and your statement should say so:

• Pre-recorded audio and video published before 23 September 2020
• Live audio and video
• PDFs and other documents published before 23 September 2018, unless people need them to use a service
• Maps, provided the essential information such as an address is given in text
• Third-party content you did not pay for or develop, such as social media widgets
• Archived websites that are no longer updated or needed for a service

Outsourced websites: still your responsibility

Most schools buy their website from a supplier. GOV.UK is clear that the school remains legally responsible for meeting the regulations, and suggests asking the supplier what it would cost to fix the gaps, agreeing what is reasonable now, writing the plan into the statement, and building accessibility into the next contract. A supplier who cannot tell you how their templates perform against WCAG 2.2 is telling you something.

A one-hour audit you can run yourself

• Tab through the home page and an enquiry form without a mouse. Can you see where you are and reach everything?
• Turn on the built-in screen reader on a phone and listen to a policy page
• Zoom the browser to 200 percent. Does anything disappear or overlap?
• Open five PDFs. Can you select the text? If not, it is a scan
• Check three images for alt text by viewing the page source or using a browser extension
• Read your accessibility statement. Does it exist, is it dated within the last year, and does it say how to ask for help?
• Run a free automated checker on the home page, the admissions page and a policy page and read the errors, not just the score

Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues, so the manual checks matter more than the score.

What good looks like

A school website that takes this seriously is not visibly different, it is just usable by more people: the grandparent with poor eyesight reading the newsletter, the parent using a screen reader to check term dates, the dad on a cracked phone at 11pm looking for the uniform policy. Everything in Little Fruitcakes school website design is built with WCAG 2.2 principles in mind and we publish the annual statutory items as pages rather than PDFs, so the accessibility statement is short and honest.

Common questions

More school website guides

• What schools must publish online: the statutory checklist
• What a school website should include
• Little Fruitcakes: school website design
• Multi-academy trust websites
• Nursery website guides from Little Fruitcakes

Sources

• Understanding accessibility requirements for public sector bodies, Government Digital Service and Central Digital and Data Office, last updated 30 September 2024
• Make your website or app accessible and publish an accessibility statement, GOV.UK
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, W3C
• What maintained schools must or should publish online, Department for Education, last updated 24 October 2024