The School Policy Handbook

A thirty-one page handbook for school leaders on the policies your school holds, and the ones nobody reads.

Most schools carry between forty and eighty policies. Several are out of date, a few contradict each other, and almost none are known to the staff they govern. This handbook is about closing the gap between what a school says, what it does, and what it can evidence.

What is inside:

• Three kinds of policy, and why each fails differently
• How to establish your own statutory list, and keep it dated and verified
• The policy register: what to record, who owns it, and how to make it a work plan rather than a filing exercise
• Review cycles and delegation, so your governing body approves rather than performs approval
• The one-day audit: a full diagnosis of your policy suite in a single working day
• The four tests to apply to every policy, including the one most audits skip
• What to do with what you find: retire, merge, rewrite or leave
• How to write a policy people will use, and the eight rules that fix most policy prose
• Consultation, approval and launch, so a new policy actually lands
• What to do when the policy and the practice have drifted apart
• Ten model policies, one page each, ready to adapt: teaching and learning, curriculum, assessment, feedback and marking, reading, homework, inclusion, professional development, staff workload and wellbeing, and communication with parents
• Two printable templates: the policy register and the audit record
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Please note: this handbook is not legal advice and it is not a compliance product. Statutory requirements differ by jurisdiction and change regularly. The ten model policies are drawn deliberately from the non-statutory space, where the value lies in professional judgement. There is no model safeguarding, child protection, behaviour, complaints, SEND, admissions, data protection or employment policy in this pack, and that is intentional. Those must come from your own regulator, authority, trust or legal adviser.

Written by Max Kelly, Executive Headteacher and Inclusion Quality Mark assessor working across the UK, Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Instant download, PDF, print-ready A4.