SchoolDocs was established in 2006 as a collaborative venture between experienced educationalists and a specialist policy and procedure company.

The founders recognised that thousands of school principals and boards across the country were grappling with near identical issues to ensure their policies and procedures were comprehensive, up-to-date, effectively consulted on, and easy to use.

One estimate is that the true cost to a school of performing these tasks properly is $10,000 per year, taking into account the value of trustee, principal, and staff time, and printing and distribution costs. The costs of poorly considered and maintained policies and procedures may be even greater.

Another issue identified was that school principals are under increasing pressure to streamline and devolve their administrative activities to free up time to perform their important strategic, leadership, educational, and communication functions.

SchoolDocs has developed a core set of policies and procedures that are applicable to all primary schools in New Zealand. The policies and procedures are regularly reviewed and updated based on feedback from the self-review activities of subscribing schools and from other expert advice as required. A specialised content management system allows the policies and procedures to be tailored to each school’s unique circumstances, and published to school-specific web sites.

The entire system is geared to allow subscriber schools to avoid re-inventing the wheel thousands of times over, to dramatically reduce costs, improve the effectiveness of their policies and procedures, and free-up trustees and staff to focus on more important activities.

SchoolDocs is led by its four founding directors and is supported in its day-to-day operational activities by Streamliners NZ Ltd.

Kay is a classroom teacher with more than 20 years’ experience. Her detailed knowledge of teaching and learning, and her enduring marriage to a school principal, have both been important preparation for her role as Business Relationship Manager for SchoolDocs.

Emma has been a technical communicator since 1989, and she has written plain English policies and procedures in industry sectors such as banking, health, manufacturing, retail sales, technology, and software. She leads the Streamliners technical writing team, is a senior member of The Society for Technical Communication's New Zealand chapter, and is Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Graduate Diploma in Information Design (Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology). She has a BA (Hons) in Linguistics.

Philip has been a school principal since 1987, with a short break for good behaviour teaching in PNG. He is currently principal at Paparoa Street School in Christchurch, a decile ten school with a staff of 50 and a roll of 593. He is passionate about designing school systems which are robust and compliant, and which create time for school leaders to spend leading learning. He has been a parent representative on the board of a large high school, and is currently serving on the executive committees of the Canterbury Primary Principals’ Association and the New Zealand Principals’ Federation. And, just in case you were wondering, Phil is Kay's husband and Emma's big brother.

Ian is a business consultant and director of SchoolDocs Ltd and Streamliners NZ Ltd. His background includes fifteen years in senior corporate planning roles in the health, housing, electricity, and banking sectors. He has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Canterbury University.

Streamliners specialises in gathering, structuring, writing, editing, and publishing policies and procedures for many of New Zealand's largest companies. It employs an experienced team of technical writers and business analysts to develop content to meet end-user needs. The lead technical writer on the SchoolDocs project is Megan McBeth, who has a Graduate Diploma in Technical Communication and joined the Streamliners writing team in early 2003. The company uses specialised content management and web deployment tools to cost-effectively maintain and deliver policies and procedures to users throughout the country .

Streamliners delivers a mix of advisory, technical writing, and web deployment services to SchoolDocs.