Where our data comes from

Every figure on OfferDay comes from published government data. This page lists each source, explains how we turn it into what you see on a school page, and sets out the rules we follow when comparing schools. If you spot something that looks wrong, please tell us; corrections matter to us and to the families using the site.

OfferDay covers England, Wales and Scotland. Each nation runs its own inspectorate, its own performance publications and its own vocabulary, so we present each in its own terms and never mix them: no figure, grade or ranking is ever compared across a national border. The sources below are grouped by what they tell you, with the nation named each time.

The school register

England and Wales (GIAS)

The Department for Education's Get Information About Schools register is the official record of every school in England and Wales. It gives us the facts on a school page: name, type, age range, gender, religious character, capacity, pupil numbers, address and location, and each school's unique reference number (URN). The register is published daily and we refresh from it regularly. When a school converts to an academy it gets a new URN, and the register records the link; that is how a school page can show the history of the school it used to be, clearly labelled as the predecessor. For Welsh schools we add sector, language medium, governance, religious character and pupil numbers from the Welsh Government's address list of schools, because the register carries less detail for Wales.

Scotland (school contact list)

Scotland is not in the GIAS register, so Scottish schools come from the Scottish Government's school contact list. Scotland does not use URNs: each school has a SEED code, the Scottish Government school identifier, which we use in the same way. This gives us the name, sector, denomination, address and council area for every open school in Scotland. The contact list has no coordinates, so we geocode each school's postcode using Ordnance Survey's Code-Point Open, which lets nearby-school listings work. Scotland's register also has no clean post town, so we group schools into town hubs by finding the nearest city or town in Ordnance Survey Open Names; a school with no city or town within about seven and a half kilometres is listed under its council rather than a town.

Inspection outcomes

Every inspection we show states which inspectorate made it and the date it was made. We never present one nation's judgement on another nation's scale, and where an inspectorate reports in words rather than grades we show that honestly rather than inventing a grade.

England (Ofsted)

Ofsted publishes management information about state school inspections monthly, and we take inspection outcomes from it: report card judgements for inspections from November 2025, and overall grades, graded judgements and ungraded outcomes from the years before. A school's page shows its most recent inspection, always with the date and always labelled with the framework it was inspected under. Where a school's latest visit was an ungraded inspection that confirmed an earlier grade, we say exactly that rather than presenting it as a fresh grade. Our report card guide explains the systems in detail. Independent schools are mostly inspected outside this dataset, so many show no inspection outcome here.

Wales (Estyn)

Estyn inspects schools in Wales. Its terms of use do not permit its reports to be republished, so we do not hold a copy of Estyn's report library; instead a Welsh school's page shows the headline facts, attributed to Estyn, being the most recent inspection date, the report type and the follow-up status or headline outcome where it is plainly available, and links straight to the school's own report on the Estyn website. Estyn stopped giving maintained schools summary grades in 2022, so for recent inspections there is no overall grade to show, by design. Our guide to Estyn inspections explains the two eras in detail.

Scotland (Education Scotland)

Schools in Scotland are inspected by His Majesty's Inspectors, part of Education Scotland, against the How good is our school? quality indicators on a six-point scale. Those evaluations appear only inside each inspection report rather than in any structured list we can hold, so a Scottish school's page shows the inspection date and report type, attributed to Education Scotland, and links straight to the school's own report. We never synthesise a grade from the report text. Our guide to Scottish inspections explains the framework and scale.

Performance and characteristics

England (exam results)

Results come from the Department for Education's school performance service. We hold the three most recent published years, currently 2022/23 to 2024/25. For primary schools we show the share of pupils reaching the expected and higher standards in reading, writing and maths at the end of Key Stage 2, plus average scaled scores. For secondary schools we show Attainment 8, the share achieving grade 5 or above in English and maths, and EBacc measures. The same service supplies the context figures: free school meal eligibility, English as an additional language, and absence rates.

Wales (school characteristics)

Wales does not sit Key Stage 2 SATs, and its school-level exam measures are not published under an open licence we can reuse, so we do not show attainment or rankings for Welsh schools and we do not invent an English equivalent. What we do show, from the Welsh Government's annual school census, are school characteristics: free school meal eligibility, which is the headline measure of deprivation in Wales, and the share of pupils with English as an additional language, for the latest three years. We present these as context, clearly labelled as characteristics rather than attainment.

Scotland (school characteristics)

Scotland measures achievement differently again, through Curriculum for Excellence levels and senior-phase results, but these are published only in banded or restricted forms with no open bulk download at school level, so we do not show attainment or rankings for Scottish schools. From the Scottish Government's annual pupil census we show school characteristics: pupil roll, teacher numbers, the pupil-teacher ratio, average class size, English as an additional language, the free school meal figure for the years where it is meaningful, and the spread of pupils across the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. As with Wales, these are context, not attainment.

Gaps you will see, and why

• Small cohorts are suppressed. The government withholds figures that could identify individual children. Where you see no figure for a small school, that is deliberate protection, not missing data.
• Progress 8 is suspended nationally for 2024/25 and 2025/26, because the pupils taking GCSEs in these years sat no Key Stage 2 tests during the pandemic, so there is no baseline to measure progress from. Primary progress measures were discontinued after 2022/23 for the same kind of reason.
• New and recently converted schools may have no published results yet.
• Special schools' results are shown but never ranked. Raw attainment says little about schools whose pupils have complex needs.
• Independent schools' Attainment 8 is not comparable. Many of their qualifications are excluded from the government measure, which makes their published scores misleadingly low, so we leave independent schools out of averages and rankings.

How town and local authority figures are built

The headline figures on town and local authority pages are weighted by cohort size, so a school with 120 pupils in the year group counts for twice as much as one with 60. This matches how the Department for Education builds its own area averages. We only show an area figure when at least three schools contribute to it.

How rankings work

Ranking pages order schools by exam performance only: the latest year's reading, writing and maths expected standard for primary, and Attainment 8 for secondary while Progress 8 is suspended. We never rank schools by inspection results, because England is part way through a change of inspection system and a report card cannot be meaningfully ranked against a 2019 overall grade. For the same reason we only publish a ranking page where at least five schools have comparable results.

Rankings exist for England only. Wales and Scotland publish no open-licence, school-level attainment data, so there is nothing to rank fairly, and we do not manufacture a ranking from the characteristics we do hold. A ranking always sits within one nation and one family of measures; we never place schools from different nations in the same table. You can browse every ranking table by area from the school rankings index.

Freshness and corrections

Each school page states when its information was last updated. Different sources move at different speeds: the register changes daily, inspection data monthly, and exam results annually in the autumn. If something on a school's page is out of date or wrong, we can apply a manual correction while the source catches up; the underlying government record stays untouched.

Licensing

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The English data is published by the Department for Education and Ofsted through Get Information About Schools, Ofsted's monthly management information and the school performance service.

Welsh register and characteristics data comes from the Welsh Government and StatsWales under the Open Government Licence; Scottish register, characteristics and inspection data comes from the Scottish Government and Education Scotland under the same licence, and Scottish coordinates and town hubs use Ordnance Survey Code-Point Open and OS Open Names, which contain OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2026. Estyn inspection material is a special case: its terms of use do not permit reuse, so we hold none of its report content and only link to each school's report, which Estyn's terms allow. We are not affiliated with any inspectorate or government department.

One last thing. Data narrows a shortlist; it does not choose a school. Visit the schools you are considering. The feel of a school on an ordinary Tuesday tells you things no dataset can.