Methodology
Nothing here is guesswork or opinion. Each report is assembled from official records in four straightforward steps, and this page walks through every one of them so you can see exactly where each figure comes from.
We look your postcode up in Postcodes.io, a free open service that returns the latitude and longitude for a UK postcode. That gives us a precise point to measure from, so when we say a school is 0.6 miles away, that distance is from your postcode, not from a town centre.
The list of schools comes from the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register, the official record of every school in England. From it we take each open state school, its exact location, its type (community, academy, voluntary aided and so on), its age range, its size, and whether it is faith-based, single-sex or has a sixth form. We then rank those schools by their distance from your point, nearest first.
For each school we look up its most recent inspection in Ofsted's published management information, which records the outcome and the date of every inspection. We show the rating and the year it was given. Where a school has had a shorter check since its last graded inspection, we show that outcome too, so the newest available signal is always in front of you.
We lay the schools out in order of distance, put each rating next to its date, highlight the highest-rated school near you and flag any carrying a formal concern, and add the context that helps you read it correctly. That becomes your PDF.
In September 2024 Ofsted stopped giving state schools a single overall grade. Before that date, every inspected school got one of four words: Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement or Inadequate. Those old grades still exist in the record, so a school last graded in, say, 2019 still carries that word, even though the school may have changed a great deal since. From September 2024 onwards, inspections no longer produce that single word, and Ofsted is bringing in report cards with separate judgements instead. That is why you will see three kinds of entry in a report: a graded school with a clear rating and an older date; a school whose most recent activity is a shorter ungraded check, shown as its latest outcome; and, increasingly, schools inspected under the new approach. We always show the date so you can weight the word against how old it is.
A grade is a snapshot of a few days, sometimes years ago, not a guarantee about today. We show you the official record and its date; we do not re-inspect schools or add our own opinion of them. Use the report to build a shortlist, then visit in person, and remember that whether you get a place depends on catchment and admission criteria, not distance alone.
The underlying data is public and official. For the specific sources, see the sources page.
