About School Chooser

Choosing a school is one of the biggest decisions a family makes. The facts you need are spread across a dozen government websites, sold back to parents behind paywalls, or boiled down to a star rating nobody can explain. School Chooser puts everything that is published about every school in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in one place, scores it in a way that is fair to schools with a tougher mix of pupils, and shows how it worked that out.

Who makes it

School Chooser is built and maintained by Matthew Hodson, Lincoln, UK. It is published by Search Ventures Ltd, company number 10588553.

It is not affiliated with Ofsted, the Department for Education or any school, trust or local authority. No school pays to appear, to be ranked, or to remove anything. The site is free to use and carries no paywall.

Where the data comes from

Everything is official open data published under the Open Government Licence: the Department for Education's school register and performance statistics, Ofsted's inspection outcomes and Parent View results, the Office for National Statistics postcode directory, the English Indices of Deprivation, HM Land Registry sales and police.uk recorded crime. The data sources page lists every dataset with the edition currently loaded. Imports run automatically every day; the score is recalculated whenever a source changes.

Report a wrong figure

Every number on a school page comes from a published file, and we would rather fix a mistake than argue about it. A contact address will be published here before launch. Schools can also ask for a note to be shown alongside a figure that is technically correct but misleading, for example where a merger split a year group.

Admissions data

The government's figures stop at council level. How many families put a school first, how many got a place and how far away the last child lived are only published by each council, usually in its admissions booklet, and every council does it differently. We are adding them council by council. If you have a link to your authority's latest “how places were allocated” report, send it and we will load it.

Privacy

The site sets no tracking cookies and uses no advertising network. Server logs record requests for security and capacity planning and are deleted after 30 days. Headteacher names shown on school pages are taken from the Department for Education's public register.