Schools — methodology

1. Data sources, licence and freshness

The schools section is built from official Department for Education and Ofsted datasets, loaded into our PostGIS database via ETL and refreshed on a rolling cycle.

• School register and metadata — Department for Education Get Information About Schools (GIAS): URN, name, type (academy / community / free school / VA / VC / independent), phase (primary / secondary / all-through / 16+), age range, gender, capacity, location and local authority code.
• Ofsted inspection outcomes — published Ofsted Management Information including overall effectiveness, sub-judgements (quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, leadership and management), the inspection date, the inspection framework version, and special-measures status.
• School performance tables — DfE performance data for KS2 (reading scaled scores), KS4 (Progress 8, Attainment 8, % achieving grade 5 in English and maths) and KS5 (average A-level points per entry), plus national and local-authority benchmarks for the same year.
• Pupil characteristics — DfE published statistics for FSM eligibility, EAL, SEN support and EHCP, persistent absence, ethnicity breakdown and average class size where available.
• Destinations and admissions — DfE destinations data (sustained education, apprenticeships, NEET, Russell Group progression) and admissions data (PAN, applications, oversubscription flag) where published.

Licence: GIAS, Ofsted Management Information and DfE performance and admissions tables are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains Ofsted information and Department for Education data.

Freshness: our ETL refreshes the school register and Ofsted ratings on a rolling cycle. Ofsted publishes outcomes shortly after each inspection; performance and admissions tables are usually annual. The "Ofsted date" we display is the date of the most recent Ofsted inspection in our dataset, so you can see for yourself how old the rating is.

2. What we do

• Resolve the postcode to a centroid via Postcodes.io and run a PostGIS spatial query for schools within roughly 10km, ordered by distance.
• Surface the five nearest primary, the five nearest secondary, and the five nearest independent schools, with distance in metres.
• Show the most recent Ofsted overall effectiveness grade (Outstanding / Good / Requires improvement / Inadequate) plus the inspection date, so older ratings can be read in context.
• For independent schools without an Ofsted rating, mark the inspectorate as ISI (Independent Schools Inspectorate) and direct readers to the ISI website rather than displaying a misleading "not rated" label.
• Where the school's URN matches a DfE performance row, show the headline figures for the relevant key stage alongside the national and local-authority benchmark for the same year.
• Where pupil characteristics, destinations or admissions data are published, show the most recent year on record, with class size, FSM, EAL, SEN, persistent absence, sustained-education-after-16 percentages and oversubscription flags.
• Hide schools with nothing meaningful to say. A state school with no Ofsted rating in our dataset is omitted rather than shown as "Not rated", to avoid false negatives.

3. What we don't do

• We do not show catchment areas or admissions priority zones. Catchments are set by the admissions authority (the local authority for community schools, the school itself for academies, free schools and VA schools) and are not part of GIAS. They change year to year.
• We do not predict whether your child will get a place. Distance to a school is not the same as eligibility, and oversubscription criteria vary by school.
• We do not include nurseries, childminders or alternative provision in this list. Our nearest-neighbour query targets mainstream primary, secondary and independent schools.
• We do not write our own ratings. All grades and judgements come directly from Ofsted's published data; we do not score or rank schools ourselves beyond ordering by distance.
• We do not update Ofsted ratings between inspections. A rating stays current in our dataset until Ofsted publishes a new one for that URN.
• We do not publish ISI inspection details. ISI inspection reports are not available as a bulk machine-readable feed; we link out to the ISI site instead.

4. Known limitations

• Distance is straight-line from the postcode centroid. It is not a walking, driving or bus-route distance, and it does not reflect roads, footpaths, rivers or safe-route considerations.
• The postcode centroid is not your front door. UK postcodes typically span 10–80 properties, and the nearest school by centroid may not be the nearest by your actual address.
• Ofsted ratings can be old. Ofsted's inspection cycle has changed repeatedly and can run multi-year between visits, especially for schools previously rated Outstanding under exemption rules. Always read the inspection date alongside the grade and, where it matters, read the underlying Ofsted report.
• Inspection frameworks change. Ofsted's methodology has evolved (single overall grades, four-grade scale, removal of overall effectiveness grades in 2024 for state schools). We surface the framework version where the dataset includes it, but a "Good" from 2014 is not directly comparable to a "Good" today.
• Independent schools are reported under a different regime. Most association independents are inspected by ISI, not Ofsted, and their reports are not published as bulk data — we can only show the school's GIAS metadata and link out.
• Performance benchmarks lag. Published KS2/KS4/KS5 figures cover historic exam years and may not reflect current cohort performance, particularly in years affected by exam-policy changes.
• Pupil characteristic and destinations data may be missing for small schools, recently opened schools, or schools where DfE has suppressed values for disclosure-control reasons.
• Oversubscription is a single-year snapshot. A school that was oversubscribed last year may not be next year, and vice versa, particularly following catchment or PAN changes.

5. What this is not a substitute for

6. Further reading

• Methodology overview — how the whole report is built.
• Report disclaimer — limits of liability and the scope of all sections.
• Data sources & attribution — full licence detail for every source we use.
• Ofsted reports — full inspection reports for every state school in England.
• Compare school performance — the DfE's canonical performance-table service.