Data sources and limits

Where it comes from

Three sources, all published by government and used under the Open Government Licence.

• Get Information About Schools, the Department for Education’s register: names, addresses, phase, type, age range, intake, capacity, and provision such as sixth form, nursery, boarding and SEN.
• Ofsted, from the monthly management information: inspection dates, outcomes and evaluation areas. Reports from November 2025 grade several areas with a separate safeguarding decision; older ones carry a single overall word. The two are not the same thing and are never merged.
• DfE performance data: SATs, GCSE and A level results, shown against the national figure for the same year.
• postcodes.io and OpenStreetMap: postcode lookup, and the map itself. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.

We do not collect anything from schools directly, and nothing on this site is submitted by them. Where a school disagrees with what is here, the correction has to happen at the source.

How old it is

The honest answer is that it varies by figure, and the gaps are bigger than people expect.

• Exam results are published once a year for a completed academic year, so the newest figures here describe pupils who sat those exams one to two years ago. Progress 8 in particular cannot be calculated for the most recent years at all.
• Ofsted outcomes come from a monthly file. A school inspected recently may still show its previous grade.
• The register is refreshed alongside Ofsted. A school that has just opened, closed or changed hands may lag.
• Admission outcomes, where we hold them, describe one named past year and are never updated in place.

What goes stale fastest

Not everything ages at the same rate, and it is worth knowing which figures to distrust first.

• Anything about admissions. Criteria, deadlines and how far a school reached last year all change annually, and the rules are set by each school or council rather than nationally.
• Contact details. Phone numbers and websites come from the register and are only as current as the school’s last return.
• Headteachers. People move, and the register is often the last thing updated when they do.
• Pupil numbers and capacity. A snapshot from one census day, not a running total.

What we work out ourselves

One figure here is ours rather than published: the score out of ten. Everything else on the site is reported as its source published it.

The score is a way to shortlist, not a verdict. It cannot see teaching, pastoral care, how a school handles a child who is struggling, or whether your child would be happy there. And because attainment tracks intake heavily, even a local score partly describes who attends a school rather than what the school adds. How it is calculated, and why there is no national table.

What the figures cannot tell you

• Distance is straight-line. Not walking or driving distance, and it takes no account of rivers, railways or main roads. A school half a mile away across a dual carriageway is not half a mile away.
• Locations are approximate. Coordinates are converted from the national grid and can be out by around a hundred metres. Fine for judging an area, not for finding a gate.
• Results are often suppressed. Where a cohort is too small to publish without identifying pupils, the figure is withheld. Those measures are left out rather than shown as zero, and there are no results at all for 2019/20 or 2020/21.
• Pupil numbers are a snapshot. Collected on one census day, so a school near capacity may still have places in a given year group.

What we do not show

Some things are missing on purpose rather than by omission, and it is worth saying which.

• Catchment areas. For a community school there is no fixed boundary. It is wherever the last offer happened to fall that year, and it moves with the size of the cohort. Drawing it as a shape on a map would state a certainty that does not exist about something that decides a child’s school place.
• A national ranking. See above.
• Reviews or ratings from parents. We hold none, and nothing here is influenced by schools or by advertisers.

Before you act on any of this

Use this site to shortlist and to compare. Before an application, a house move, or anything else that turns on the detail, check with the people who set it:

• Admissions: your local council, and the school’s own admissions policy for schools that set their own criteria.
• Ofsted: the full report on Ofsted’s site, which says far more than a grade can.
• Results: the DfE performance tables, and the school itself, which will have figures newer than any published set.
• Everything else: visit. An open day tells you things no dataset holds.

We publish this in good faith and correct what we can, but the figures are only as good as the sources they come from, and we cannot guarantee that any of them is accurate, complete or current.

We accept no responsibility for decisions made on the basis of anything on this site. Choosing a school, applying for a place, or moving house are yours to decide, and the bodies that set admissions and publish these figures are the ones to confirm them with. Nothing here is advice.

Found something wrong?

Tell us at info@localschool.co.uk and we will look.

Most details come straight from the DfE register, so a school listed with the wrong address, phase or contact details usually has to be corrected at source: schools and local authorities update their own records in Get Information About Schools, and the change flows through here on the next refresh. We cannot override a published figure without breaking step with everything else on the site.