Frequently Asked Questions
How much does SchoolDocs cost, and why is it good value?
SchoolDocs does not charge an initial set up cost, just the annual subscription fee. For that fee, your school receives:
- a robust, well written, and ‘best practice’ set of policies and procedures tailored to your school, without you doing all the work
- a single up to date source for your school’s policies and procedures, hosted by SchoolDocs and accessible to your whole school community
- regular reminders through the email advisory service of upcoming reviews and scheduled compliance issues
- an online review tool, including online review reports of content and implementation feedback, doing away with a lot of paperwork and administrative effort
- the confidence that with over 150 SchoolDocs schools and the SchoolDocs team involved in each topic review, the review process is collaborative and rigorous and the content up to date
- new content developed for you, as required by an audit or new legislative requirement, saving you a lot of time and effort and ‘reinventing of the wheel’
The annual subscription price is determined by the roll size of your school. SchoolDocs believes that there is a strong business case for you to consider when you are evaluating our service. One of the greatest costs is your time, and time spent on “this” cannot be spent on “that”!
Grade |
Roll Size |
Annual Price (excl GST) |
U1 |
7-50 |
$950 |
U2 |
51-100 |
$1,050 |
U3 |
101-150 |
$1,150 |
U4 |
151-300 |
$1,250 |
U5 |
301-500 |
$1,350 |
U6 |
501-675 |
$1,450 |
U7 |
676-850 |
$1,550 |
U8 & above |
851+ |
$1,650 |
Based on the average annual subscription fee for SchoolDocs, it equates to the cost of just four relief teaching days.
Paper-based documentation costs money - in photocopying, folders, surveys, and administration time controlling the documents - even if the board is writing the policies for free. Very often, the school is still not confident that their policies and procedures are up-to-date, accurate, and reflecting the latest requirements - and they can't access them online.
If the principal or senior management are researching, word-smithing, and updating content, the cost is hard to estimate - but if done to a high standard would have to amount to a minimum of two to four hours per month, or over $2000 of principal time alone.
By implementing SchoolDocs at your school, you are releasing the principal and senior management team to focus on leading learning, you are releasing trustees to focus on governance, and you are receiving a very robust, up to date and widely reviewed set of online policies and procedures.
How much work will SchoolDocs mean for us?
The most amount of work you will do when you subscribe to SchoolDocs is to: complete the initial online tailoring questionnaire which gives us the detail to tailor your policies and procedures; and then check your site before it goes live.
Once the set up process is complete, SchoolDocs will save your school a lot of time that you currently spend researching, word-smithing and updating your policies and procedures, preparing and processing reviews, and managing paperwork. No longer will you need policy and procedure folders dotted around the school that constantly need to have pages updated. It will all be online, up-to date and easily accessible.
Advisory Emails
When your website is up and running, you will receive advisory emails a couple of times a term - with recommendations, reminders about reviews and audits, upcoming changes, and other information that relates to school policies and procedures. The emails are usually sent to three school recipients of your choice; usually the principal, a board member, and an administrator or staff member. The advisories are written in a user-friendly style with numbered sections and the ‘to do’ tasks written in red.
Someone in the school then notifies the reviewers, whether it be the board of trustees, staff and/or parents, for example through the school newsletter or email.
SchoolDocs recommends that your board of trustees delegates a member to be responsible for overseeing SchoolDocs and includes it as a regular topic on the board meeting agenda and/or the principal cuts and pastes the SchoolDocs advisory into their principal's report to the board. This will ensure that your board stays up to date with your policies and procedures and engages with reviews and new content regularly, rather than in a big burst which often tends to happen in busy schools.
Staff are able to access the school’s policies and procedures easily and can review online in a matter of minutes. Many of our SchoolDocs schools are finding it beneficial to review collaboratively, as a staff at a syndicate/team meeting, or as a board at a board meeting, and send the feedback collectively as one submission.
What are the advantages of SchoolDocs?
Policies and procedures are a necessary part of school life. However, they are not the reason a school exists. SchoolDocs believes that principals, senior management, and boards need to be supported to focus on leading learning. SchoolDocs provides content expertise, delivery expertise, and the ability for schools to collaborate painlessly to develop best practice.
- SchoolDocs will save you time and money:
- No more paper copies to keep current and distributed.
- No more secretarial time spent formatting, versioning and copying paper copies.
- No grappling with other online formats such as GoogleDocs and finding that the time burden of drafting and maintaining the set is still considerable.
- The risk of poorly drafted policy is minimised - you have input from experts all around the country.
- The policies and procedures are online and accessible to the whole school community.
- The content is monitored and updated to comply with New Zealand legislation, ERO requirements, and other audits, and in response to advice sent to schools.
- The principal, who is under increasing pressure to delegate administrative activities, can spend more time performing important strategic, leadership, educational and communication functions.
- The SchoolDocs review process streamlines reviewing and the advisory service helps to keep you compliant.
Is SchoolDocs a reliable service?
SchoolDocs was established in 2006 as a collaborative venture between experienced educationalists and a specialist policy and procedure company.
Read about our people and check out our map to see subscribing schools. Talk to your friends, read the testimonials on our home page, or ask our Business Relationship Manager for a reference school.
SchoolDocs has the expertise to write policies and keep them up-to-date, and the SchoolDocs team endeavours to respond quickly to questions and requests.
We host the websites ourselves and have rigorous back-up and disaster recovery procedures to protect your information and keep it available. Our hardware includes a large on-site generator and back-up satellite internet.
What does signing up to SchoolDocs commit us to?
By signing up to the SchoolDocs service, you agree to the terms and conditions of the service agreement which are outlined in our sample service agreement. You agree to pay the subscription price annually when invoiced.
If you decide to exit the service, SchoolDocs will supply a Word version of the policy and procedure document set for you to maintain and manage - with the expectation that “© SchoolDocs Ltd” is displayed prominently wherever they are used.
Will our SchoolDocs site reflect our school?
Many of a school’s policies and procedures are generic and driven by legal requirements and ‘best practice’. They are not generally what define your school. It is the students, the school vision, the strategic plan, the teaching and learning, the curriculum plan, and the school community that reflect your school.
SchoolDocs provides you with a policy and procedure set which incorporates "surface-level" school-specific features such as school colours, logos, and photos, and also deeper features such as your school charter, curriculum plan, reporting procedures, and describes other special characteristics, such as Catholicism.
Your school’s policies and procedures website is arranged with a table of contents organised into the National Administration Guidelines (NAGs). Each NAG has a front page which sets out the overarching policy and underneath sits the relevant policies and procedures.
Someone in the school, usually the principal, fills in an online questionnaire which provides SchoolDocs with the necessary information to tailor your school’s site. (You can contact SchoolDocs and arrange to see the questionnaire before you sign up).
When SchoolDocs has tailored your site, the principal, board, and other key people in the school are given the opportunity to checks the content and liaise with SchoolDocs before it "goes live" to the school community.
What does a SchoolDocs website look like?
- Your SchoolDocs site is easy to navigate - with a table of contents and a search.
- Each school has a unique user name and password and the site is accessible to the whole school community.
- Related documents are just a click away with hyperlinks to other topics, forms and relevant websites.
- To take a look at our Model Site, please contact our Business Relationship Manager for a user name and password.
- View a collage of several different SchoolDocs websites.
What does a SchoolDocs policy look like?
The SchoolDocs content has been developed by educationalists and a specialist documentation services company. The content has been kept up to date with regular reviews, trigger reviews, changes from new requirements, and other updates that the SchoolDocs team action after extensive research and in consultation with the school.
Contact our Business Relationship Manager for access to our whole set of policies and procedures on our Model Site.
How do we sign up to SchoolDocs?
To sign up now: contact the SchoolDocs Business Relationship Manager to send you the instructions for the online tailoring questionnaire and the service agreements. Your site could be up and running in a month! |
- Ask the SchoolDocs Business Relationship Manager to get in touch and give you a chance to have a closer look at SchoolDocs. Principals and trustees first engage with the Model Site (containing our core set of policies and procedures) and maybe one or two of our reference school sites.
You can share the presentation from our website with other board members or interested parties, or arrange for a visit or teleconference.
- The school signs and posts a contract to SchoolDocs and starts completing the online tailoring questionnaire. At this point the principal is engaging with the content and using some information from their existing set of policies and procedures.
It takes a few hours to complete the questionnaire, but this task can be shared between the principal, board, and admin staff.
- When the online questionnaire is completed and SchoolDocs has the signed contract, staff at SchoolDocs create a tailored website for your school.
This usually takes about three weeks from the time you complete the questionnaire, unless faster turn-around time is needed. We'll let you know if it's likely to take longer.
- Once we've finished the draft site, we'll ask the school to read through the content and check that it's correct for your school.
This step will typically involve largely the principal, but also key members of the board and staff. There are various other ways of engaging more fully with the content, for example, the Health and Safety committee could review the Heath and Safety content and the various committees of the board of trustees could engage with their particular section of the set.
- When the school is satisfied with the content, a resolution is passed at the next board meeting, adopting the SchoolDocs policies and procedures. The resolution could contain a clause outlining the need for a transition period from the old to the new.
- Then SchoolDocs will explain how to advertise the site to your school community.
Then you're up and running with SchoolDocs, and you'll hear from us a few times a term – with reviews, reminders, upcoming changes, and other information that relates to school policies and procedures.
How do we adopt our new set of SchoolDocs policies and procedures?
The transition from a school’s existing set of policies and procedures to the SchoolDocs set is a process that occurs over a period of time. It starts before subscribing to SchoolDocs, when principals and boards first engage with the Model Site (containing our core set of policies and procedures) and maybe one or two of our reference school sites. On subscribing, the principal completes the tailoring questionnaire which provides SchoolDocs with the detail required to tailor the site to your school. At this point the principal is engaging with the content and using some information from their existing set of policies and procedures.
When SchoolDocs has prepared your school’s site, the principal is asked to review the special content before it goes live to the community. There are various other ways of engaging more fully with the content, for example, the Health and Safety committee could review the Heath and Safety content and the various committees of the board could engage with their particular section of the set. At some point the board may formally resolve to adopt their new set of policies and procedures, working on the basis that over the next three years content will all be reviewed and/or audited.
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