What we hold, and what we don't

Published admissions and inspection figures for schools in England, from the DfE, Ofsted and local authorities.

Having a page about a school is not the same as knowing everything about it. This page tells you both: what we hold, and what we do not. If something is missing here, it is missing because nobody publishes it, not because the answer is no.

What is published

We only make a page for a school when we hold at least 3 years of figures for it. With less than that, the page would not tell you enough to be worth reading, so we do not make one.

What is not covered

Nations

England only. We know the names of Welsh schools, but we do not publish any admissions figures for them. Scotland and Northern Ireland are not covered at all.

Middle schools in three-tier areas

89 open middle schools across 14 councils do not show up under primary or secondary. Children start at these schools at about age 9. That is not the start of primary school and it is not the start of secondary school either. Putting them in one of those groups would say something untrue about them, so we leave them out on purpose until we can show them properly.

Catchment areas

England has no single national list of school areas. Each of the 152 councils decides for itself whether to publish a map, and in what form. So we collect them one council at a time.

We now hold maps for 3,067 schools across 23 councils. You can see which ones on the map of England.

For every other school we hold no map. That means we cannot tell you whether an address is inside an area or outside it. It is not the same as saying it is outside.

Councils also mean slightly different things by these maps. Some use them to help decide who gets a place when a school is full. Some use them to decide who gets free school transport. Many use them for both. Each school page says what we hold and points you to the council.

How places were rationed

When a school runs out of places, one rule decides who gets the last one. Some councils publish that rule, and how far away the last child lived. We hold this for 417 schools. For every other school we can tell you how many families wanted a place, but not how the places were shared out.

How current the data is

This is when we last downloaded each set of data. It is not when the data was written. A file we downloaded today can still be about an earlier year. Every figure on a school page says which year it is about.

Each council publishes its own school area maps, so those are counted together rather than listed one by one. Every school page names the exact council file its own figures came from, and the day we downloaded it.