How are the website requirements set?
The requirements are based on the following DfE guidance:
We match the requirements to each school (as best we can based on GIAS data about each school) so that we only check the relevant requirements.
Robin does not yet cover all of the requirement areas, and you should cross check the results against the full DfE list and any other sources that apply.
It is also worth noting that there may be other information that schools are required to publish based on their status or other legislation. There are also separate requirements for some individual areas (for example, there are requirements about what a behaviour policy must contain) that are not included in the DfE pages above, and so are not included in the Robin compliance check.
In the future, we'd like to broaden the Robin website review to go beyond the DfE's list, but it felt like the right place to start!
How does Robin work?
We automatically read the school website pages and documents, and then use a large language model to find and extract the information for each requirement.
We want Robin to look for the information as a person would - so it is not simply searching every webpage and document to find anything it can. For each compliance check,. Robin follows three steps:
Decide which sources of information are most likely to include the information
Check each of those sources of information
Summarise the results and decide whether the requirement is met
In order to perform this task, Robin needs to use human-like judgement. The important thing to know is that, like people, sometimes Robin will get things wrong. We aim to minimise the effect of this, but we can't completely eradicate it.