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Powerful Features That Matter

Find out how your school can benefit


How SchoolDocs Helps

SchoolDocs helps schools to avoid re-inventing the wheel with documentation. Staff are able to find and access policies and procedures easily, and review them online in a matter of minutes. This dramatically reduces costs, improves the effectiveness of policies and procedures, and leaves principals, senior management, and boards with more time to focus on teaching and learning.

Regular, small reviews help the board to stay up-to-date, and engage with reviews and new content regularly, rather than in one big, daunting burst.

Features and Benefits

Save Time

Why reinvent the wheel?
Use our robust polices and procedures created with expert input and wide audience review.

One Source

Access one place for all your policy documents that is tailored to your school and is accessible to the whole school community.

Collaborate

With over 2000 schools and our expert team involved, each policy review is collaborative and rigorous. Your school will benefit from the experience of others.

Smart Review

Our unique review system allows board members, staff and parents to comment on policies and procedures online. The automated system organises scheduled reviews of content.

Online Access

Policies and procedures are accessed online via a password protected website. This is available to the whole school community. Say goodbye to out-of-date photocopied documents.

Reduce Risk

Eliminate the risk of poorly drafted policy. Content is monitored and updated regularly to comply with New Zealand legislation, ERO requirements, MOE guidelines, other audits, and in response to our own reviews.

Regular Reminders

The SchoolDocs advisory service sends regular emails direct to your inbox to remind you what to do, when and how. We'll help keep you up-to-date with the latest compliance requirements.

Tailored for You

We know one size doesn't fit all, so we tailor our core policy and procedure content to reflect your school's unique circumstances.

Common Questions

When you first subscribe to SchoolDocs we'll ask you to complete an online tailoring questionnaire. This lets us know what makes your school unique and allows us to tailor our standard policies and procedures to fit your school. You'll also need to check your site before it goes live. Once you've finished that, the majority of the work is done!
 
From that point on, SchoolDocs will save your school precious time. We'll research the latest requirements, put them into easy to understand language and update your policies and procedures for you. We'll also prepare and process regular reviews in consultation with you, and manage the 'paperwork'. You'll no longer need policy and procedure folders dotted around the school that constantly need to have pages updated. All your information will all be online, up-to-date and easy for the whole school community to access. Leaving your school time to focus on leading learning.

Advisory Emails 

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, e.g. the principal, a board member, and an administrator or staff member. The advisories are written in a user-friendly style with easy to follow actions.

A nominated person from the school then notifies the reviewers (board of trustees, staff and/or parents) of the review, through the school newsletter or via 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 find 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.

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. 

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

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.

We were early adopters of the wonderful SchoolDocs and have never regretted our decision. Having policies reviewed using collective feedback in such a simple way makes this process so easy, yet allows us to have input and retain what is important for our school. Likewise their reminder to me on what aspects I need to report to my BOT allows me to have one less thing to manage. I cannot recommend SchoolDocs enough and know that a brief discussion with Kay will convince any school AND board.”

John Bangma, Principal, Mairehau Primary School