Chalkford

For teachers and leaders in England

Is this actually required of me?

Chalkford answers that question one page at a time — and says which authority the answer actually rests on, including when the answer is that your school decided it.

843 questions answered from 289 primary sources, quoted word for word

Built for teachers, middle leaders, heads and trust leaders who have been told they have to do something — and want to know who says so.

Built on DfE · legislation.gov.uk · Ofsted — England only, last checked 29 Sept 2026

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What the chips mean

The distinction nobody prints

Six kinds of “you have to”. Only one of them is the law.

On GOV.UK, a page you must have regard to and a page that is merely advice label themselves in the same small grey type. Every Chalkford card carries one chip instead, naming what is behind the demand — told apart by weight rather than colour, so it survives a printout on a staffroom wall.

240 of 843 cards — 28% — end in “not required” or “your school’s choice”. This reference corrects teachers in their school’s favour about as often as it tells them they are bound. That balance is deliberate, and it is checked.

What one card is

A question, an answer, and the actual words.

This is a real card, in full — not a mock-up. Every claim on this site is built the same way, and the quotation is checked mechanically against the source it came from.

The question

Do I need parents' permission to keep a pupil after school?

What is behind it

Not required

The answer

No. Parental consent is not a condition of a lawful after-school detention, and neither, in England, is 24 hours’ written notice — that condition was narrowed to Wales in 2012 and many school policies still repeat it as if it were the law.

What the source actually says

“Parental consent is not required for detentions that satisfy the conditions mentioned in ‘What the law allows’.”

Behaviour in schools, DfE, February 2024, p.21 · Read it at the source ↗

Read the whole card — the statute, the conditions, and what your school may still require →

Open to everyone

Read these in full. No code needed.

Kept current

Checked against the source, and dated.

Guidance moves. A card records when it was last checked as well as when it last changed, because on a reference like this those are different facts and both matter.

19 themes, from behaviour, searching and exclusions, workload, marking and planning, ofsted and inspection to residential special schools. Browse all 843 cards →

The honest limit

Knowing where a demand comes from is not permission to refuse it.

A school can lawfully require things the law does not — teachers’ contracts permit reasonable direction. Chalkford does not tell you what to do, and it is not a campaign. It tells you what the source says, and on whose authority.

“This is a school choice, not a legal duty” is a better sentence in a workload conversation than “this isn’t required”.

The obvious question

“Couldn’t I just ask an AI?”

Often, yes — and it will often be right. These are public documents and a good model reads them well. Chalkford is itself AI-maintained; the difference was never that no machine was involved.

The difference is what you are left holding. An AI hands you an answer, in the same confident voice the demand arrived in. Chalkford hands you the paragraph it came from, the publisher, the date it was last checked against the source, and a chip saying whether it is law or somebody’s preference. Only one of those survives being put in front of a head of department.

“An AI said so” is not a sentence that wins a workload conversation. A paragraph reference might.

The way in

Free, and it always will be.

Chalkford is in a closed beta while the corpus fills out. Say who you are and I’ll send you a code. The beta is about finishing the corpus, not about charging for it.

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