Data sources & licences

School Facts uses the public/open sources listed below. Each one contributes to public output, and its commercial-use and derivative permissions have been checked against the linked terms.

Possession of a file or recovery copy is not permission to publish it. This list is an allowlist: a new source cannot reach public transformed output unless its dataset, licence and attribution have been recorded and its rights gate passes. No private commercial or contract feed is used in public output.

Sources and reuse rights

“Derivatives” means permission to adapt, combine or calculate new outputs from the source. The Open Government Licence v3.0 permits copying, adaptation and commercial exploitation, subject to attribution and its stated exclusions.

What the sources supply

• School identity and characteristics: the GIAS register supplies URN, name, address, type, phase, age range, capacity, pupil numbers, trust, ward, LSOA and coordinates.
• Results and pupil context: DfE performance downloads supply key stage 2, 4 and 5 results, school census fields, absence and destination measures. The separate progression release supplies higher-education and training destinations; the applications release supplies dated places, preferences and offers.
• Inspection evidence: Ofsted management information supplies dated historic overall judgements and current report-card aspect and safeguarding judgements.
• Neighbourhood context: Census 2021 supplies LSOA/MSOA population characteristics; IMD 2019 supplies deprivation domains and child-income deprivation; Price Paid Data supplies residential sales aggregated here to postcode sector.
• Roads, transport and postcode lookup: DfT collision/casualty, NaPTAN and count-point traffic data supply the stated nearby context. The postcode finder queries postcodes.io for Great Britain postcode coordinates and administrative geography.

Versions in the current build

• GIAS register: 14 August 2026.
• DfE performance, census, absence and standard destination measures: 2024/25; Progress 8: 2023/24; higher-education progression cohort: 2021/22; applications and offers: up to 2026/27.
• Ofsted outcomes and report cards: as at 31 July 2026.
• ONS Census: 2021; English indices of deprivation: 2019.
• HM Land Registry: annual Price Paid Data files for 2024 to 2026.
• DfT road-safety context: the five final years ending 2024; NaPTAN and road-traffic files are the snapshots recorded by the current immutable build manifest.

Attribution, modifications and limits

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. School Facts modifies the sources by filtering to relevant establishment records, joining school files by URN or geographic identifiers, converting coordinates, aggregating Price Paid Data to postcode sector, calculating stated percentages/medians and attaching nearby context by straight-line distance. Those transformations are School Facts’ work; the source publishers do not endorse this site.

HM Land Registry: Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2021. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The source includes third-party address fields with narrower terms; School Facts does not republish addresses and uses postcode only to aggregate residential sale prices for a property-price information service.

Great Britain postcodes: Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2025. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2025. Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2025. The postcode finder is limited to England-facing results; Northern Ireland’s separate commercial restriction is not used.

Road traffic: DfT says individual road-link estimates are less robust than regional or national figures and may not come from a recent count at that point. School Facts shows the source year and uses the figure only as context for nearby collision counts, not as a school-safety judgement.

For the pipeline itself — how records are joined, what is recalculated and which official measures no longer exist — see the methodology.

Two gaps in the official data, and what we do about them

There is no Progress 8 for 2024/25

Progress 8 compares GCSE results against where pupils started at the end of primary school. The 2024/25 Year 11 cohort would have sat key stage 2 tests in summer 2020, when they were cancelled. With no baseline, DfE published Progress 8 as "not applicable" for every school in England. We therefore show 2023/24, clearly labelled with its year, and show 2024/25 attainment alongside it.

There are no primary progress measures at all

Key stage 2 progress was measured from a key stage 1 baseline. Statutory key stage 1 tests ended in 2023, so no primary progress measure has been published since. For primary schools, attainment is now the only official measure — and attainment tracks intake closely. That is the gap the peer comparison below is meant to fill.

What "a top third university" means

DfE ranks higher education providers by the average entry qualifications of the students they admit, and reports the share of a school's leavers who went to one in the top third. It is not a league table of universities and it says nothing about teaching quality — but it is the only public measure that distinguishes getting into higher education from getting into a competitive course, and it separates schools far more sharply than the headline progression rate. Nationally 20.9% of leavers reach one; the range across schools runs from nil to almost nine in ten.

It follows a different, earlier group of leavers than the destination figures published in the performance tables, and counts anyone arriving within two years rather than the term after leaving. The two are shown separately and labelled with their own cohorts rather than blended into one number.

What the area figures do and do not mean

Three different things get called "a nice area", and they do not agree with each other. The site shows them separately rather than blending them into one score.

• Deprivation describes the people who live there. The headline decile covers income, employment, education, health, crime, housing and environment together; the child poverty decile counts only children in low-income families, which is the measure closest to the intake a school actually draws on.
• House prices describe the property, not the people. They are the median of registered residential sales included in Price Paid Data for the school's postcode sector since January 2024.
• Census figures describe the resident population in 2021: what they do, what they hold, how they live.

These routinely point in opposite directions, and the site flags it when they do. Parts of inner London sit in the dearest tenth of England for housing and the most deprived fifth for child poverty at the same time. A high price tells you what a house costs, not who goes to the school.

All of it describes the ground the school stands on, not its pupils. Selective, faith and independent schools draw from far wider than their own neighbourhood, and for those the area figures say least.

Derived figures

Comparison with schools of a similar intake

Schools are split into five equal groups by the share of pupils who are disadvantaged (eligible for free school meals at any point in the last six years, as recorded in the performance tables). Within each group, schools are ranked on the headline attainment measure for their phase, and the school's position within its own group is reported. It answers a different question from a league table: not "did this school get high results" but "did it do well for the pupils it actually teaches".

This is a percentile within a group, not a value-added model. It does not adjust for prior attainment, and it is not a substitute for Progress 8 — it is what can be computed honestly from the data that exists.

Reading Progress 8 through its confidence interval

DfE publishes a confidence interval with every Progress 8 score. Where that interval includes zero, the school's result is not statistically distinguishable from the national average, and we say so rather than reporting the point estimate as a fact. Only where the whole interval sits above or below zero do we describe pupils as having made more or less progress than similar pupils nationally.

Distance

Straight-line distance between the postcode centroid and the school's recorded location, converted from the Ordnance Survey national grid. It is not walking or driving distance, and it is not a catchment boundary.

Neighbourhood figures

Census 2021 counts for the lower layer super output area containing the school — about 1,500 residents. They describe the area the school sits in, which is not the same as the families who attend it, particularly for selective, faith and independent schools.

What is deliberately not here

Catchment maps, parent reviews, and any score that blends unrelated measures into a single star rating. Each of those adds an appearance of precision the underlying data does not support.