Eric Anderson, one time head of Eton, is quoted as saying that good schools are about 'machinery, machinery, machinery'. What he was driving at, I think, was that well-run schools need robust, well-run systems. With the inspection regime now being what it is, nowhere more so is this the case than in the need to put good systems in place to ensure (ugh) compliance.
Andy Kemp has already written a brilliant post explaining how he has used Google Docs in his school to keep policy documents current and up-to-date. At Oswestry, I bowdlerized Doug Belshaw's concept of single canonical URLs to explain to staff the need for one single document to hold 'the truth' on any given issue.
I have taken the liberty of calling this post 'Policy management #2' as it follows on directly on from Andy's original post. Taking Andy's advice we now have all our formal school documents stored as Google Docs. They are stored in an alphabetized Google sheet for ease of reference. Then, using a Google script, we have automated the tedious process of keeping the policies checked and up-to-date.
Here's the header row of our Google sheet:
The script that we've written:
- checks the last SLT check date
- sends an e-mail to the relevant member of the SLT if the policy was last checked over 300 days ago
The e-mail generated by this looks something like this:
The next step is to automate the process for Governors, but they'll need some training first :-)