Reports
Questions the official tables raise but do not answer, worked through on every school in England.
Schools that beat their postcode
Every league table is mostly a map of advantage. These are the state schools serving England's more disadvantaged intakes that do markedly better than schools with the same intake — the ones a raw ranking buries.
Read the report →The hardest schools in England to get into
Not a catchment map — nobody publishes those. This is what actually happened in the last admissions round: how many families put each school first, and how many of them were offered a place.
Read the report →How much of a league table is just intake
Raw results track how advantaged a school's pupils are more closely than they track anything the school does. Here is the size of that effect, measured across every state school in England.
Read the report →The Ofsted grade freeze
Ofsted stopped awarding overall grades in September 2024 and now grades separate aspects through report cards. Thousands of schools still carry an older one-word judgement, so the badge and the present keep drifting apart.
Read the report →Does a good school cost more to live near?
Estate agents price a catchment. This is what 1.8 million house sales and every school result in England actually show — and where the relationship breaks down completely.
Read the report →Which sixth forms reach selective universities
The performance tables stop at A level grades. This measure follows students two years further, to whether they actually started a degree at a top-third university.
Read the report →