Publishing your documents online

Requirements and guidance for publishing your school's planning and reporting documents online.

Level of compliance Main audience Other

Required

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  • Boards
  • Principals and Tumuaki
  • Parents and whānau 

Under section 136(external link) and section 146(external link) of the Education and Training Act 2020(external link), school boards are required to make their school’s annual report, strategic plan and annual implementation plan available to the public on an internet site maintained by, or on behalf of, the board. 

Overview

Making your planning and reporting documents available ensures students, parents and the wider community can access information about your board’s goals and targets for your students, what your school has achieved, and how your board has managed school finances in the previous school year.

Privacy requirements when publishing online

Before you make any of your planning and reporting documents publicly available, your board must check if they contain any information that might breach an individual's privacy. If they do, you may have grounds to redact this information to protect their privacy.

The types of information which may impact on the privacy of an individual include:

  • Names of individual students.
  • Comments about individual students/families/teachers.
  • Any lists of data about individual students or data on groups of students that might enable individual students to be identified.
  • Photos of students where permission has not been given by the student/parents for their use.
  • References to specific disabilities of students may be withheld depending on context and whether it poses a risk to privacy.

If you identify that your documents do include information which could be attributed to an individual, which may be unavoidable in smaller schools, the information must be removed before the documents are published. However, care must be taken to ensure that the documents still provide the necessary information for the reader.

It is recommended that when publishing the Statement of Responsibility, as part of your annual report, you replace the signatures with a typed name, remove, or cover up the signatures.

More advice is available from the New Zealand School Trustees Association (0800 782 435(external link)).

Exceptions to privacy requirements

It is important to note that while identifying characteristics such as those above may be redacted before publishing online, the disclosures included in the Kiwi Park model financial statements(external link) are legislative requirements and cannot be redacted.

  • The Statement of Responsibility must state the name of the person who has signed it, you cannot remove this information when publishing.
  • Information about the Principal’s remuneration and any settlement payments paid to staff or board members must not be redacted.
  • Note that where a school or kura has only one person employed in either Property or Administration roles, the Kiwi Park required disclosures allow both salaries to be combined under the Administration expense category.

Publishing on a website

Schools with their own website

Your school’s website is the first place a parent or someone from your community will go when searching for information about your school. Schools who have their own websites must publish their planning and reporting documents on their website.

These should be published as soon as possible after the documents are finalised and before any due date set out in legislation. You can check the requirements on our website:

School planning and reporting

As a minimum, it’s expected that your document remains on your website until the next document is available for publishing. It is good practice to retain previous planning and reporting documents on your website in case people want to refer to them.

Please note that Facebook (or any social media platform) isn’t considered an appropriate place to publish your school’s planning and reporting documents. Not all members of your community will know how to use Facebook, have a login, belong to your Facebook ‘group’, or wish to use social media. As your planning and reporting documents are public documents, they must be accessible to all.

Schools who do not have their own website

If your school does not have a website, we can host your planning and reporting documents on our Education Counts website(external link). You can send your request for us to host your documents to planning.reporting@education.govt.nz.

Before you send them to us to publish on Education Counts, you must review them for privacy requirements and remove any personally identifiable information.

We will only publish planning and reporting documents on Education Counts for schools that do not have websites, or who have websites that are not being maintained. 

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