A website for St. Gianna Beretta Molla Catholic Primary School in Piekary Śląskie: content migration and a full set of legal requirements

For St. Gianna Beretta Molla Catholic Primary School in Piekary Śląskie (Katolicka Szkoła Podstawowa im. św. Joanny Beretty Molli) I moved the content from an old website onto a platform built for schools, and filled the site out with everything the law requires of an educational institution in Poland: a public information bulletin, an accessibility statement backed by an audit, child protection standards, and personal data protection paperwork.

The client and the task

The school was running its site on an old system and wanted to move it onto a platform built for educational institutions, and to put in order, along the way, the obligations a school website cannot skip. On top of that came a condition that decided the shape of the whole job: after the rollout the school wants to run the site itself, with no ongoing service contract. The work was therefore to end not with publishing the site, but with handing the admin panel to a person appointed by the school.

Taking stock of the old site

The first step was an inventory of the old site. It covered 22 pieces of content, 8 of which needed a decision, because they were out of date or duplicated one another. I sorted every page into one of three groups: move as is, move after a rewrite, leave in the archive. Thanks to that review, content nobody needed any more did not make it onto the new site.

Compliance instead of assurances in the footer

The public information bulletin, the public register that Polish public institutions are required to keep, went into a separate module, with the full set of pages a school has to provide, with a statutory address for electronic service in the entity’s details, and with a record beside every item showing the person responsible and the date of publication.

The accessibility statement was not produced from a template. It was preceded by an audit carried out against the checklist published by the Chancellery of the Prime Minister, on eight pages chosen so as to cover every type of page on the site as well as all the mandatory content. The audit report is published, and the statement links to it directly.

The child protection standards, which article 22c of Polish law requires of every institution working with children, went onto the site in full, and also in a version written for children, together with a reporting procedure and emergency numbers. The data protection paperwork covered a privacy policy and consent forms for the use of a person’s image, separated by situation: where an adult is recognizable in the foreground, a separate consent is needed rather than the blanket parental consent in the school files.

The school runs the site itself

The rollout closed with training in using the system, run in two parts on the same day with a person appointed by the school, and after it the handover of the admin panel together with the credentials.

What follows from it

For an educational institution a website is first a legal obligation and only then a shop window, so what decides whether a rollout like this succeeds is the part of the work a visitor will never see. A deadline holds when publication does not wait for a complete set of materials from the school office. Pages that depend on the school’s own data are built right away, and the places waiting for that data are visibly marked as content still to be filled in. And the rollout itself is only finished at the moment when the person on the client’s side can run the site without its builder.