A website for a school: pages, accessibility and children's data

A school website does three jobs: give families the information they look for, publish the documents the law requires, and stay readable for someone using a screen reader. Everything else is decoration, often expensive.

The search starts on a phone and on a fixed date: September for enrolment, June for exams, every week for circulars. The home page must show the address, the office hours and the enrolment link at once, not a slideshow of the Christmas party.

The pages a school actually uses

A circular is the most searched item and the most perishable. One PDF per notice leaves hundreds of files that nobody can find, each with a different name. Publish the text as a page with the date and the classes concerned, keep a stable address, and attach the signed PDF only when the signature matters.

Accessibility: a duty with a deadline

Directive (EU) 2016/2102 covers public sector bodies, schools included. Italy transposed it with Legislative Decree 106/2018, which amends Law 4/2004, the Stanca law. New sites had to comply from 23 September 2018, sites already online from 23 September 2020, mobile apps from 23 June 2021. The reference standard is EN 301 549, which points at WCAG 2.1 level AA, and the site must publish an accessibility statement on the AGID model.

• Declare the language with the lang attribute on the html element: a screen reader changes pronunciation.
• Every image carries an alt that says what it is for, and decorative images carry an empty alt.
• Minimum contrast of 4.5:1 on body text and 3:1 on large text, headings included.
• Full keyboard navigation, with a visible focus on links, buttons and form fields.
• PDFs with selectable text and structure: a scanned PDF is not an accessible document.

Children's data: photos, names and consent

The GDPR has applied since 25 May 2018. Article 8 sets the age of consent for information society services, and Italy raised it to 14 with article 2-quinquies of Legislative Decree 196/2003. A recognisable photo also touches the right to one's own image, article 10 of the Civil Code: consent covers it, and consent can be withdrawn. Class lists with full names, timetables carrying pupils' names and captions with surnames are the three leaks to avoid.

The office: a form someone can clear

The form is not a second inbox. One category select, a message field, an email for the reply, and a short confirmation with a reference number. State retention in the notice, keep attachments small, and give each category a named person who answers. A form nobody answers in three days is worse than a phone number.

# quante pagine pubblica il sito
curl -s https://www.istituto.example/sitemap.xml | grep -c ""

# la home dichiara la lingua della pagina
curl -s https://www.istituto.example/ | grep -o ']*lang="[^"]*"'

# la dichiarazione di accessibilità risponde
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://www.istituto.example/accessibilita

Blocks from the catalogue

Four records worth opening now: Contact 01 from Shadcn UI Blocks for the office form, the faq category with 24 blocks for family questions, Table 01 from ephraimduncan for the calendar, and the form category with 32 blocks for enrolment and requests. The licence is the one the publisher declares on the record: check it before use, and the full block code sits in the Pro part.

The limitation to state upfront

The catalogue holds React and Tailwind components: there is no school CMS, no integration with the electronic register, nothing that handles the publication of official documents. An accessibility statement cannot be generated by a script, it follows a manual review, and the PDFs uploaded over the years stay the weak point. On a school site that already exists, the blocks work as a structural reference, not as an installation.

Cost and where to start

A ten or fifteen page institutional site sits in the low thousands of euro when copy, photos and documents arrive in order. The line that gets missed is office time: if every circular needs a developer, the site stops in October. The full picture is in what a website costs, and the check to run before publishing is in how to run an accessibility audit.

For the underlying structure read a company website: what it must have; for the stack choice the comparison is in WordPress, Wix or React components. Getting into the index also needs getting a site indexed by Google.