Methodology

Every number on this site comes from a named public source with reuse rights checked before publication. Nothing is scraped from a school or submitted by a school. This page describes the path from those sources to a school page, and is explicit about what the official data no longer contains.

Where the data comes from

All of it is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and is used here under that licence with the sources named. This site is not affiliated with any school, the Department for Education or Ofsted.

• Get Information About Schools (DfE) — the statutory register of establishments: name, address, type, phase, age range, capacity, pupils on roll, trust, ward, LSOA and grid reference.
• DfE performance tables — key stage 2, key stage 4 and key stage 5 results at school level, plus the school census, pupil absence and the key stage 4 and 16-18 destination measures.
• Explore Education Statistics (DfE) — progression to higher education, the only public source for the share of leavers reaching a top-third provider.
• Ofsted management information — the latest inspection, historic overall grade where one exists, current report-card aspect grades, safeguarding judgement, publication date and report link.
• ONS Census 2021 — qualifications, tenure, car availability and economic activity for the lower layer super output area the school sits in.
• Other open public sources — DfE applications and offers, the English indices of deprivation, HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, DfT road-safety, traffic and NaPTAN data, and Great Britain postcode geography used by the postcode finder.

The exact editions, reuse rights, attribution and transformation notes are on Data sources & licences.

How the records are joined

Every source is indexed by URN — the unique reference number the Department assigns to each establishment — and joined on it. No record is matched by name, postcode or fuzzy comparison, so a school never inherits another school's results. Where a source has no row for a URN, the figure is absent rather than filled in.

A school page exists for each register entry that is open, in England, and belongs to a group a parent can apply to: academies, local-authority maintained schools, free schools, independent schools, special schools and colleges. Children's centres, childcare providers, closed establishments and British schools overseas are excluded. That leaves 23,890 schools. Every page URL ends in the school's URN, so a link made before the school was renamed still resolves — it redirects to the current address rather than breaking.

What is changed on the way through

• Missing is not zero. The performance tables mark values as suppressed, not published, not applicable or low-coverage. Every one of those codes is read as absent and shown as "not published" — never as 0, which would read as a real result and drag down any average it entered.
• Coordinates. The register gives an Ordnance Survey easting and northing; these are converted to latitude and longitude for distance calculations. Distance is straight-line from a postcode centroid to the school's recorded point — not a walking route, and not a catchment.
• Names. Trust and federation names are stored in block capitals in the register and are converted to normal case, with an exception list so abbreviations such as CE, RC, MAT and UTC survive.
• Phase. The register records the phase as "not applicable" for many independent and special schools; where that happens the phase shown is derived from the statutory age range instead.

What is calculated here

Three things are worked out here rather than taken from a published file.

• Comparison against a similar intake. Schools are sorted by the share of their pupils recorded as disadvantaged and split into five equal groups; within its own group, each school is ranked on the headline attainment measure for its phase and its percentile reported. 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.
• National percentile within phase, on the same headline measure.
• England averages, recomputed from the same files rather than quoted, so a school and the average it is shown against always come from one edition of the data.

Independent and special schools are excluded from all three. Independent schools largely enter international GCSEs that the performance tables do not count, and special schools serve pupils the measures were not designed for; ranking either against mainstream state schools would compare unlike with unlike. Their pages carry the register and inspection data in full, with the results section left out on purpose.

Trust pages average the intake-adjusted percentile across the trust's schools. Only trusts running two or more schools have a page; a single-academy trust and its school are the same thing. Federation pages do the same for GIAS federations of two or more maintained schools; one-school federations have no separate page. Where two or more member schools publish Progress 8 and a KS4 cohort size, both page types also show a pupil-weighted Progress 8 with a combined confidence interval. An interval that spans zero is not described as a win.

What the official data no longer contains

Three measures that school comparison sites still display have either ended or were never published. They are named here because presenting them as current is the most common error in this category.

Ofsted no longer gives a single overall grade

Until summer 2024 a graded inspection ended in one of four overall judgements: Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement or Inadequate. Ofsted withdrew that overall grade in September 2024. Its report-card framework, used from November 2025, instead grades separate areas such as inclusion, curriculum and teaching, achievement, attendance and behaviour, and leadership and governance. Safeguarding is judged Met or Not met. Those fields must not be averaged into a substitute overall score.

In the current data, 12,992 schools still carry a one-word grade awarded in July 2024 or earlier, 7,799 have a later inspection with no overall grade, and 3,099 have no published Ofsted outcome at all, mostly recently opened schools and independent schools inspected by ISI rather than Ofsted. School pages show the aspect grades where Ofsted has published a report card, and always label historic overall grades with their date. The full explanation.

There is no Progress 8 for 2024/25

Progress 8 measures 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, so there is no baseline; the Department published Progress 8 as not applicable for every school in England. This site therefore shows the 2023/24 score, labelled with that year, alongside 2024/25 attainment. It is not presented as a current measure, and the two years are never blended.

There are no primary progress measures at all

Key stage 2 progress was measured from a key stage 1 baseline, and statutory key stage 1 assessment ended in 2023. No primary progress measure has been published since. For primary schools attainment is now the only official measure — and attainment tracks intake closely, which is the gap the similar-intake comparison is there to fill.

How results are read

Where the Department publishes a confidence interval with Progress 8, the score is read through it: if the interval includes zero the school is described as not statistically different from the national average, rather than given a rank it cannot support. Small differences between schools are described as small. No measure on this site is combined with another into a single score or star rating, because the underlying figures do not support that precision.

Updating and corrections

The database is rebuilt by re-running the pipeline against the published files; the edition in use for each source is dated on the data page, so a figure can always be traced to a specific release. Values are carried through unchanged — where a school's own record is wrong, the correction has to be made in the Department's register, and it reaches this site at the next rebuild.

What is deliberately absent

No catchment maps, because a real catchment is set per school per year by who applies. No parent reviews, because a handful of self-selected ratings tells a reader less than the intake data does. No named feeder or destination schools, because the destination measures publish categories only — education, apprenticeship, employment — and school-to-institution flows are withheld under disclosure control to avoid identifying pupils.