The data behind Good School Finder

Last reviewed October 2026

Good School Finder compares every state-funded school in England using a handful of official, openly-licensed datasets. This page explains what we hold, where each piece comes from, and what the national picture looks like — so you can see the evidence behind the scores and read any single school in context.

What we hold for each school

For every school we join several public datasets on the school’s unique reference number (URN):

• Ofsted inspection — the latest judgement. This is now a mix of the older single overall grade and the newer report cards, because Ofsted changed its framework in 2024. We never mix the two — see reading the new Ofsted report cards.
• School details (GIAS) — type, status, age range, whether it is selective (grammar), faith character and single-sex.
• Performance — headline results and, importantly, progress (how far pupils move on from their starting points).
• Admissions demand — first-preference applications per place. A signal of demand, not a catchment or a guarantee.
• Pupil characteristics — free school meal (FSM) eligibility, English as an additional language (EAL), SEN support and EHC plans, and average class size, from the DfE January census.
• Attendance — overall and persistent absence.
• Location and area context — the postcode mapped to coordinates (ONS) and neighbourhood deprivation (MHCLG), used to describe the area, not the school.

Only the Ofsted-based judgement feeds the Good School Finder score; results, intake, attendance and area context are shown alongside it, never baked into it.

Where the data comes from

All of our data is public and openly licensed — mostly Crown copyright under the Open Government Licence v3.0 — so we can show it and attribute it:

We refresh these on their natural cadence (Ofsted monthly; most DfE releases annually; ONS quarterly), and every page shows a “data updated” date so you know how current it is.

The national picture

Most schools that still carry an older single grade are rated Good or Outstanding, with a smaller tail at Requires improvement and Inadequate. A growing group has moved to the new report cards (no single overall grade), and a further group has only an ungraded inspection. We show these groups separately rather than forcing them onto one scale, because the two systems are not comparable.

Grammar (selective) schools

Selective schools are shown on their own, because they admit by test rather than area and their grade profile differs from schools as a whole.

Disadvantage: free school meals

Free-school-meal eligibility varies hugely between schools — from a handful of percent in some areas to well over half in others — which is why we show it as context for reading results fairly, never as a mark for or against a school. Across England the spread is wide and skewed rather than a neat bell curve: many schools sit below the national average with a long tail of higher-disadvantage schools.

Class sizes

Average class sizes differ between primary and secondary, so we show them separately. Each school’s own figure is shown as context on its page.

Results and progress

Progress scores — how far pupils advance from their starting points — are centred on the national average (zero) and spread roughly symmetrically either side, so this one really does look like a bell curve. Primary (KS2 progress) and secondary (Progress 8) are different measures, so we show them as separate lines. Progress is a fairer read than raw attainment because it accounts for where children started, which is why we lead with it in the area summaries.

Progress figures appear here once the latest performance data is loaded.

Does anything move together?

It is tempting to ask whether things like class size and progress are linked. We can show how two measures move together across schools — here, average secondary progress against average class size — as an exploration. But read it with care: this is a relationship, not cause and effect. Class size, progress and disadvantage are all tangled up with a school’s intake, so a pattern here never means one causes another. It is shown as context, never as a judgement and never part of our score.

This comparison appears here once the latest performance and census data are loaded.

The picture by local authority

Admissions are run by the local authority (council), and the local picture varies. Here we pool each local authority’s schools to show its average class size and its average progress — primary (KS2) and secondary (Progress 8) kept separate, because they measure different things. We only show a figure where a local authority has enough schools carrying that measure for the average to be meaningful, so a one-school quirk can’t skew it. These are context figures by administrative area, not a league table or a judgement.

How to use this

These national patterns are the backdrop for every area and school page. A school’s grade, results or intake only mean something in context — a strong result in a high-disadvantage intake, or a cut-off distance in a high-demand area, tells you more than any single number alone. To compare schools yourself, start with the map.

Figures on this page are computed from our latest data and labelled with the date they were produced. They describe the national picture for context; they are not a judgement of any individual school or area. Sources: Ofsted, DfE and ONS, under the Open Government Licence v3.0.