Sources
What makes this worth £7 is that every line in the report traces back to a government source you could look up yourself. It is the DfE's own register and Ofsted's own inspection data, gathered in one place, rather than a stranger's opinion on a parenting thread. Here is exactly what we use.
The DfE's official register of every school in England. We use it for the list of schools near you and their facts: type, location, age range, size, faith character, single-sex or mixed, and whether a school has a sixth form. Because it is the department's own record, the schools on your list are the real, currently open schools, not a stale or made-up set.
Ofsted publishes the outcome and date of the inspections it carries out. We use it for each school's most recent rating, the year it was given, and the outcome of any shorter check since. Because the date comes straight from the record, you can see for yourself whether a rating is fresh or old, which since the September 2024 change matters as much as the rating word itself.
A free, open UK postcode lookup that returns the latitude and longitude for a postcode. We use it purely to place your postcode on the map so distances to each school are measured accurately from where you actually are.
We do not add our own judgement of any school, and we are not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by Ofsted or the Department for Education. We simply gather their published data and Postcodes.io's location lookup into one comparison. The word "Ofsted" is used only to describe whose inspection data a rating comes from.
For how these sources are combined into a single report, see the methodology.
