How the figures are put together

Which schools

Every open state-funded school in England in the Department for Education’s register, Get Information about Schools: 21,959 schools in 153 local authorities in this release. That means maintained schools, academies and free schools, including nursery, special and alternative provision schools, studio schools, university technical colleges and 16 to 19 academies. Independent schools, non-maintained special schools, colleges and universities are not included.

A school belongs to the local authority the register records. A few dozen schools sit outside that authority, most of them within a kilometre of its boundary; a few are residential special schools that one authority runs inside another. Their pages say so.

Comparators

Each figure is set against the same kind of school: a primary school against primary schools in its authority and in England, a secondary school against secondary schools, and a special school against special schools. All-through and 16 to 19 schools are compared with secondaries, as the Department for Education counts them.

• Absence and pupil characteristics: authority and England figures are rebuilt from the school-level counts the way the Department builds them, a sum of pupils or sessions over a sum of pupils or sessions, never an average of percentages.
• Suspensions and exclusions, key stage 2 and key stage 4 results, and the workforce: authority and England figures are the Department’s own published values.
• A check on every release: the rebuilt absence figures for England and for one authority are compared with the Department’s published figures, phase by phase and year by year, and the release stops if any differ at the published precision.

Inspection

Ofsted has used three ways of reporting a full inspection. Until July 2024, an overall effectiveness grade. From September 2024 until report cards began, key judgements with no overall grade. From 10 November 2025, report cards that grade each area on a five-point scale, with safeguarding met or not met. School Intel shows each inspection in its own terms and never puts judgements from different frameworks on one scale or in one trend. When an inspection was of the school before it became an academy or changed its number, the page says so.

Attendance and absence

Full academic years only, from the Department’s school-level absence statistics. No full-year absence figures were published for 2019/20, and 2020/21 is marked on every chart as a COVID year that does not compare with the years around it. Persistent absence means missing 10% or more of possible sessions; severe absence, 50% or more.

Results

Attainment only. Progress measures compare pupils’ results with an earlier stage, and the national tests and assessments that would have supplied that starting point were cancelled in 2020 and 2021, so recent years have none. Years the Department publishes as provisional are labelled provisional. Results for special schools and alternative provision are shown without mainstream comparators, because the comparison would mislead.

Pupils and the area

Pupil characteristics come from the January school census as the performance tables publish it. Deprivation is the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index 2025 decile of the neighbourhood the school sits in. It describes the area, not the school’s pupils.

Figures that are not published

The Department withholds some figures, usually where numbers are small enough to identify pupils. These show as “Not published” with the reason, never as zero.

The map

Local authority, region and country boundaries are the Office for National Statistics’ December 2025 boundaries, at full resolution and clipped to the coastline, simplified for each zoom level so neighbouring areas always share an edge. Schools are placed by the grid reference in the register. Below zoom 9 the map shows these official boundaries only; above it, streets and places come from OpenStreetMap. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are drawn but not covered: their school data is published separately.

Updates

A weekly job fetches every source, builds a candidate release, runs the checks, and publishes the candidate only if every check passes; otherwise the last good release stays up. This release was built on 20 October 2026.

What the site never does

It never ranks schools, gives them scores, bands or colours, or describes them with words like failing or struggling. A risk method does exist behind this work, and it is shown working on invented schools on How the method works, so that nothing about a real school is ever labelled.