How are the website requirements set?
The requirements are based on the following DfE guidance:
Children and Families Act 2014 (allergy safety policy requirements coming September 2026)
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.
Requirements will always shows a
MustorShouldtag underneath its name, based on DfE guidance to help you prioritise actionsHovering over the tag reveals the text from the original guidance and clicking on it opens the relevant section of the "What schools publish online" DfE webpage
When a requirement isn't met, the guidance text and a link to it also show up in the explanations section
It is 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'll be broadening 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:
Decides which sources of information are most likely to include the information
Checks each of those sources of information
Summarises the results and decides 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.
You can help us improve the accuracy of Robin by giving us feedback using the đ đ buttons in the Robin app. These help us investigate issues and improve our tests.
Sometimes Robin getting it wrong is good!
We know how hard it is to keep a website up to date, especially when the day job should be focussing on the pupils. At Robin we have spent a lot of time trawling schools websites and know that web design and organisation is not always what you'd hope it would be!
The aim for any school website is to enable the community it serves to have easy access to information about the school and its procedures. The beauty of Robin having human-like judgement means that when we flag issues it sometimes highlights improvements needed in the lay out of your website.
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If when you are using Robin you find it got something wrong consider these few things:-
what is the document called? Is it simple and easy to work out what it is ?
(pol-v1.2.4-feb-bhvr.pdf ... might not be easy for everyone to work out)where is it displayed? If Robin your uniform policy is buried amongst the lunch menus in an area called 'useful information' .. then your parents may not find it either.