Schools in Manchester

How to read this page

Ofsted changed how schools are graded in 2024. Older inspections gave one overall grade — Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement or Inadequate. Newer inspections give a “report card” that grades several areas separately, with no single overall grade. The two systems measure different things, so an old grade and a new report card can’t be compared directly. We show whichever one a school has, and label which system it came from.

To let you see a whole town at a glance, we turn each school’s latest inspection into a single Good School Finder score out of 100. For older grades, Outstanding scores highest, then Good, then Requires improvement, then Inadequate. For newer report cards, we average the area grades onto the same 0–100 scale. It’s a rough guide to help you build a shortlist — not an official Ofsted judgement — so always open a school and read its full inspection before deciding. There’s more on how the score works on the About page.

How the lists are ordered

Schools are listed by their Good School Finder score, best first. Quite often several schools tie — for example, a town might have five Outstanding primaries. When that happens we don’t put them in a random order; we use the same simple rules every time, so the list looks the same each time you visit:

1. The Good School Finder score comes first — a higher score is listed higher.
2. If two schools have the same score, the one whose safeguarding was judged effective is listed above one where it was not.
3. If they still tie, the school inspected more recently comes first, because its grade is more likely to reflect the school as it is today.
4. If everything above is equal, we simply list them in alphabetical order by name.

So if two schools are both Outstanding, the one with effective safeguarding and a more recent inspection appears higher — never just by chance.