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How to Build a School Website Parents Can Actually Use

How to build a school website: pages parents and prospective families need, required information, news and calendars, safeguarding, accessibility and a prompt.

Mythex Team · 2026-09-29 · 6 min read

A good school website answers the questions parents ask most often, such as term dates, contacts, letters home, admissions and policies, without anyone needing to phone the office. Build it around two groups: families considering the school, and families already there. You can build the public site with an AI website builder, with news, calendars and letters stored in a database so staff can update them. Keep private data about pupils out of it. That belongs in the school's management system, not on the website.

Who uses a school website

The home page should serve the two parent groups first. A current parent at 7:30 am wants to know whether school is open and what's happening this week. A prospective parent wants to get a feel for the place.

What a school website needs

Core pages

• Home with key contacts, latest news and upcoming dates
• About: ethos, the head's welcome, staff and governors or board
• Admissions: how to apply, deadlines, open days, how to book a visit
• Term dates and calendar, including INSET or training days and exam periods
• Curriculum by year group or subject
• Parents' area (public): letters home, uniform, lunch menus, clubs, transport
• Policies and required documents
• Vacancies
• Contact with a map, phone number, office hours and who to email about what

Required information

In many countries, schools must publish certain information online, such as admissions arrangements, policies, curriculum details, exam results or inspection reports, and some rules cover accessibility too. The list depends on the country and the type of school. Get the current list from your education authority and treat it as a checklist for the site. This guide can't tell you what applies to your school.

Decisions to make before you build

Public website or parent portal?

Keep them separate. The website is public information about the school. A parent portal holds information about individual children: attendance, grades, reports, payments, messages. That needs logins, strict permissions and careful data protection, and most schools already have a management information system that includes it. Link to it from the website rather than rebuilding it. If you're planning something bigger, see how to build a school management system.

How news, events and letters get updated

This is what keeps the site useful. Rather than editing pages directly, store news posts, calendar events and letters in a database, and give staff a simple admin page to add them. Letters are often PDFs; store them as file uploads and list them by date and year group. Decide who can publish: usually one or two members of office staff, with the head approving anything sensitive.

Languages

If many families speak another language at home, consider key pages (admissions, contacts, term dates) in those languages. Machine translation is a starting point, but have a fluent speaker check anything important such as admissions deadlines.

Safeguarding and privacy

• Photos of pupils only with parental consent under your photo policy. Avoid full names next to images, and don't publish photos that show which classroom or route a child uses.
• No personal data about pupils on the public site: no class lists, no named results tables, no medical or behaviour information.
• Staff contact details. Consider role-based email addresses (office@, admissions@) instead of personal ones.
• Contact forms. Store messages securely, limit who can read them, and delete them when no longer needed.
• Data protection law applies to children's data with extra care in many places. Your data protection lead should review the site before launch.

Accessibility

School websites must work for parents with visual impairments, reading difficulties, or limited time and data. Use real text rather than images of text, clear headings, good colour contrast, descriptive link text ("Autumn term dates" rather than "click here"), and alt text on images. PDFs are hard to read on phones and for screen readers; publish important information such as term dates as a web page and offer the PDF as an extra. Our guide to making your website accessible has a fuller checklist, and some places have legal accessibility requirements for public-sector sites.

A first prompt for an AI builder

Build a website for Riverside Primary School. Pages: Home, About (head's welcome, staff, governors), Admissions (how to apply, open days, a "book a visit" form), Term Dates, Curriculum by year group, Parents (letters, uniform, lunch menu, clubs), Policies, Vacancies and Contact. The home page shows the office phone number, the next five calendar events and the three latest news posts. News posts, calendar events and letters are stored in a database, with an admin page where office staff can add them; letters are uploaded as PDF files tagged by year group. Term dates must be a readable web page, not only a PDF. Friendly, clear design with high contrast and large text. Works well on phones. Use placeholder photos without children's faces.

Then add real content page by page, starting with contacts, term dates and admissions.

Build it step by step

1. Collect the required-information list from your education authority and map each item to a page.
2. Gather content: contacts, term dates, admissions criteria, policies, staff list (with consent), curriculum summaries, photos cleared under your photo policy.
3. Build the home page, contact page and term dates first, since they get the most use.
4. Add the news, calendar and letters admin, and have the office staff member who will use it add a real letter and event while you watch.
5. Work through the required-information checklist and tick off each item.
6. Test accessibility: navigate with the keyboard only, check contrast, and try a screen reader on the key pages.
7. Check on a phone. Can a parent find today's news and the office number in ten seconds?
8. Get sign-off from the head and the data protection lead.
9. Publish on the school's domain. See how to connect a custom domain.
10. Set a termly review to update dates, staff and policies.

Common mistakes

• Everything as PDFs. Hard to read on phones and hard to find.
• Out-of-date term dates or staff lists. Parents stop trusting the site.
• Pupil data on the public site, even something that seems harmless like a named sports team photo.
• A home page built for inspectors rather than parents: long mission statements and no contact number.
• Too many people with publishing rights and no review, or only one person who knows how to update anything.
• Rebuilding the parent portal when the school's existing system already does it.

When a ready-made product is the better choice

• Your trust, district or authority provides a website platform. It may already meet required-information and accessibility rules, and staff may be trained on it.
• You need a parent portal, payments for trips and meals, or messaging. Specialist school systems handle this with the right data protection controls.
• Nobody has time to own a custom site. A school-focused website provider with support may suit you better.

Build your own when you want a site that feels like your school, need a specific tool the platforms don't offer (a club sign-up, an open-day booking form, a lunch menu that staff can edit), or want to move off an old, expensive site. The event registration guide covers open-day bookings with capacity limits.

Building it with Mythex

Mythex is an AI app builder: you describe the school's pages in chat and it builds the site in a live preview, including a phone-size view. When you ask for editable news, calendar events or letters, it adds a Postgres database to the project, and uploaded PDFs use the project's file storage. You can publish on the Free plan to a yourname.mythex.ai address and connect the school's own domain on Pro.

Mythex doesn't include a parent portal, payments or messaging for families; those would be separate projects using providers you choose. Staff logins for the admin page use an auth approach you pick (add authentication). The language school template is one starting point, and the website templates have more layouts.