Your quick guide to the DfE digital leadership and governance standard for schools and colleges

The DfE now considers overseeing technology to be a senior leadership team responsibility. It has published expectations for schools, colleges and trusts in the digital and technology standard for digital leadership and governance.

While this summary will give you the essentials, our more detailed free guide to the standard will help you prepare to meet it.

The standard has four elements:

Digital technology is now an SLT responsibility

•  One SLT member must be the nominated digital lead.

The digital lead will:

• have strategic oversight of digital technology and ensure it supports the development plan

• create and manage the digital technology strategy

• help their colleagues embed digital technology that meets staff and student needs.

Keep up to date records for hardware and systems

• Asset, contract and information registers should be in place.

• It’s not the digital lead’s responsibility to create the registers, they can delegate this task. However, they are essential for effective financial planning and creating a digital technology strategy.

Disaster recovery and business continuity plans must include technology

• You can include technology in overall planning or have specific technology-related recovery and continuity plans.

• The SLT digital lead is responsible for this element of the standard. 

Create a digital technology strategy and review it annually

• The SLT digital lead is responsible for this element of the standard.
• The strategy should cover a two-year period.

The strategy element is fourth in the list for a reason. The DfE standard states that schools and trusts should complete the first three before creating their digital strategy.

You can read more about how to meet the DfE’s other digital and technology standards in schools and colleges in our blog posts on the topic.