Where our data comes from, and where it stops

Everything on this site is built from official published sources. None of it is collected from schools directly, and no published figure is adjusted. This page says what each dataset is, how old it is, how often it changes, and — the part most sites leave out — what it cannot tell you.

The datasets

What these figures cannot tell you

Results are one to two years old

Exam results are published a year or more after the pupils sat them, and later revised. A school's most recent published results describe a cohort that has already left.

Progress 8 is missing for the most recent year

DfE did not publish Progress 8 for 2024/25, so a school's newest attainment figures and its newest progress figure come from different years. Wherever we show both, each carries its own year.

There are no results at all for 2019/20 or 2020/21

Exams were cancelled. Any trend spanning those years has a hole in it, and nothing we show fills that hole with an estimate.

Small cohorts are suppressed

Where publishing a figure could identify individual pupils, DfE withholds it. A blank is usually a small year group, not a bad result.

Locations are approximate

School coordinates come from the register and can be out by around a hundred metres. Distances we show are straight lines, not walking or driving routes, and no admissions authority measures distance the way we do — always check with the council.

Pupil numbers are a single day

Roll and free-school-meal figures come from one census day each year. A school's roll moves throughout the year, and being over or under its stated capacity is normal.

Inspection grades come in two incompatible systems

Since November 2025 Ofsted grades several areas separately and issues no overall word. Older inspections carry a single Outstanding/Good/Requires improvement/Inadequate judgement. The two are not the same thing and we never merge them — see the FAQ.

A recent inspection may not be reflected yet

Ofsted's file refreshes monthly, so a school inspected in the last few weeks may still show its previous grade here.

Some things we simply do not have

Class sizes, staff turnover, waiting-list positions, and how far a school's offers reached in a given year are not published nationally. Where a school's own website publishes something — clubs, trips, open evenings — we read it, but coverage is uneven and depends on what each school chooses to put online.

If something looks wrong

Most errors originate in the official source, and correcting them there is what makes them stick — a school updates its own register entry through Get Information About Schools. But please tell us too, particularly if you think we have combined correct data into a wrong conclusion. That is our mistake, not the source's.

School and inspection data is published under the Open Government Licence. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Price data © Crown copyright and database right, HM Land Registry.