Around a month ago the Department for Education in England updated its guidance on what maintained schools must publish online. If you click that link and look at the list of topics covered, you’ll agree, I think, that they are all important.

Yet I couldn’t help thinking about both the timing and the structure of this missive. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Schools don’t know from one day to the next whether they will have a full complement of teachers or pupils, and then right in the middle of it all, this arrives. I imagine conversations like this going on up and down the country:

Teacher: Good morning, Headteacher. Half the staff are self-isolating, and so are half the kids. Unfortunately, the teachers that are in don’t know anything about the kids that are in, and don’t teach the right subjects or the right age groups.

Headteacher: Never mind that, Johnson. Have the up-to-date stats relating to our retention rates been uploaded to the school’s website?

I suspect what happened is that some low-level functionary in the DfE dusted off his or her Five Year Plan and realised with horror that their target for sending out updated guidance to schools was 12th November. In that kind of scenario, it doesn’t matter whether the update is needed, and it doesn’t even matter if it’s useful. The act of sending out an update is all that matters, because that particular target can be ticked off on the Plan. Job done.

I may be wrong about all this, but I’ve come across it so many times before that I shouldn’t be at all surprised.

But even being magnanimous and giving the DfE the benefit of the doubt, it would have been really helpful if the document had highlighted which parts of it had been updated. All of it? The guidance on retention rates? The complaints procedure?

As I argued in Report On DfE Communication Skills: Could Do Better, the DfE ought to:

• Take a leaf out of the software developers’ book. They number the versions, and when there is an update they publish what has changed. Writing that the guidance has been amended to take into account the fact that the government’s five tests have been met is completely unhelpful, because you still have to read through the whole thing to try and see what exactly has changed.

• It would be even more helpful if the paragraphs were numbered too. Then the “What’s changed?” section at the start could say things like “Paragraph 14 no longer applies”, or “Paragraph 14 has been updated”.

Those simple amendments would save headteachers’ time, and enable them to better prioritise. In my opinion, not implementing such changes is at best thoughtless, and at worst indicative of a lack of understanding of the pressures schools are under at the best of times, let alone now.