Data Sources & Attribution

School Atlas aggregates publicly available data from official sources to help parents compare and find schools. This page explains where our data comes from, the licences under which it is used, and how we attribute our sources.

Government Data (Open Government Licence)

The majority of school data displayed on School Atlas is Crown Copyright and is reproduced under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL). This licence permits free reuse of public sector information for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.

Department for Education (DfE)

• Get Information About Schools (GIAS) — the official register of schools in England, providing school names, addresses, phases, establishment types, and status information. Updated weekly.
• Explore Education Statistics — 240,000+ school performance records spanning 15 years (2010–2025). Key Stage 2, Key Stage 4, and Key Stage 5 data including attainment scores, progress measures, subject breakdowns, and pupil destination data (where leavers go after school). Updated annually.
• DfE Applications & Offers data— national-level admissions statistics showing first preferences, total applications, and offers made. Updated annually.

Source: Department for Education. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Crown Copyright.

Ofsted

• Ofsted Management Information — inspection outcomes for state-funded schools including legacy grades (Outstanding to Inadequate) and the new report card grades introduced from November 2025. Updated monthly.
• Ofsted Early Years Register— registered childcare providers including nurseries, with inspection outcomes and registered places.

Source: Ofsted. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Crown Copyright. School Atlas is not endorsed by or affiliated with Ofsted.

Estyn (Wales)

• Estyn Inspection Reports — inspection outcomes for schools in Wales. Estyn is the education and training inspectorate for Wales. Since 2022, Estyn no longer assigns summative grades; inspection reports provide descriptive evaluations of school quality. Follow-up status (e.g. special measures, significant improvement) is tracked.

Source: Estyn (estyn.gov.wales). Contains public sector information. School Atlas is not endorsed by or affiliated with Estyn.

Welsh Government (StatsWales)

• Address List of Schools and Schools Census (PLASC) — official register of Welsh maintained schools, including addresses, medium of instruction, phase, and pupil counts. Welsh Government data is Crown Copyright and reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Stats Wales per-school PLASC datasets — we draw the following per-school facets from the Stats Wales v1 data API and refresh them with each PLASC release:
  • Schools by local authority, region and category (dataset 2018f447) — statutory governance category (community / foundation / voluntary aided / voluntary controlled), Welsh Government 2022 statutory Welsh-medium category (welsh / dual / transitional / bilingual / English-medium with significant Welsh / English) and pupil headcount.
  • Pupils aged 5–15 eligible for free school meals by school (dataset 327c8825) — per-school FSM eligibility counts and percentages. Counts are rounded by Welsh Government to the nearest 5 to protect pupil confidentiality. Cells flagged [c] (confidential), [t] (rounded total only), .., :, * or xare treated as “not available” rather than zero.
  • Pupils in maintained schools with additional learning or special educational needs by school (dataset 18db6ba2) — per-school Additional Learning Needs (ALN) counts and percentages under the Welsh Government’s Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Act 2018. Where the published percentage is suppressed but a count is available, we compute it from the school’s PLASC headcount and label the source as “computed”.
  • Pupils in maintained schools by school and year group (dataset 9b0d8f7a) — per-school pupil counts broken down by Reception, Year 1–14 and the two nursery years. Used to render the year-group breakdown card.
  • Pupils in maintained schools aged 5 or over by school and ethnic background (dataset 4c96d2a8) — per-school pupil counts by Welsh PLASC ethnic background category. Welsh PLASC does not break Irish out of White British and combines Gypsy, Roma and Traveller into one category; the categories on the school profile reflect that.
  • Delegated school budgets and outturn expenditure (dataset dd52942a) — per-school planned budget share, total expenditure, total LEA resources and reserves carried forward, in £ thousand. Suppressed cells are treated as “not available” rather than zero. The dataset uses a separate Welsh-Government LA numbering scheme (5xx) to PLASC; we map the two using a hand-curated 22-row table verified empirically against Stats Wales 2024–25 school names, so a school’s finance row joins to its PLASC profile via the same 4–digit establishment number.
  • Pupils in maintained schools by school (dataset eb697e0e) — per-school total headcount broken down by male / female. We capture the multi-year trend so the school profile can show how pupil numbers have moved over time, while the latest figure cross-checks the governance dataset above.

Source: Welsh Government / Llywodraeth Cymru — Stats Wales (StatsCymru). Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Crown Copyright. School Atlas is not endorsed by or affiliated with the Welsh Government.

Education Scotland (Scotland)

• Education Scotland Inspection Reports — school inspection reports for Scottish schools. Inspections use the “How good is our school?” framework and evaluation grades (Excellent to Unsatisfactory) against quality indicators.
• Scottish Government School Contact Details & Statistics — official register of Scottish schools and Pupil Census data (roll, FSM, SIMD distribution).

Source: Education Scotland and the Scottish Government. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Crown Copyright. School Atlas is not endorsed by or affiliated with either body.

Education and Training Inspectorate (Northern Ireland)

• ETI Inspection Reports — inspection reports for schools in Northern Ireland.
• Department of Education (DE) Northern Ireland — official register of NI schools (including grant-aided integrated, Irish-medium, and independent schools), enrolment figures, and management type.

Source: Education and Training Inspectorate and the Department of Education (Northern Ireland). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Crown Copyright. School Atlas is not endorsed by or affiliated with ETI or DE.

Companies House

Company registration details for schools operating as limited companies, sourced from the Companies House API. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Crown Copyright.

Charity Commission

Financial information for schools registered as charities, including income, expenditure, and reserves, sourced from the Charity Commission Register. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Crown Copyright.

Local Authority Admissions Data

Borough-level admissions data including Published Admission Numbers (PAN), last distances offered, and application numbers is sourced from council publications across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Local authority data is public sector information subject to the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015. Council PDFs are processed using AI-powered extraction to ensure consistent, structured data across all boroughs regardless of publication format.

We currently source council-specific admissions data (including distance thresholds) from 29 London borough councils, with the remaining boroughs covered by DfE national data.

Schools Awards & Accreditations

School Atlas aggregates publicly listed school accreditations from the following awarding bodies. In each case we fetch only the public directory, we respect robots.txt, and we store the awarding body's own source URL on every record.

• Artsmark — the creative quality standard for schools, awarded by Arts Council England. We ingest the public Artsmark settings directory (Silver / Gold / Platinum awardees).
• UNICEF UK Rights Respecting Schools Award (RRSA) — Gold (Rights Respecting) and Silver (Rights Aware) accredited schools, as listed by UNICEF UK.
• Investor in Pupils — accredited schools listed in the Investor in Pupils public directory.

Sources: Arts Council England; UNICEF UK; Investor in Pupils. School Atlas is not endorsed by or affiliated with any of these awarding bodies. Award data is reproduced as factual listings with attribution to each body's public directory.

Mapping & Geocoding

OpenStreetMap

Map data is provided by OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database Licence (ODbL). Map tiles are served by CARTO.

© OpenStreetMap contributors. Data available under the ODbL.

Postcodes.io

Postcode geocoding is provided by Postcodes.io, which uses data from the ONS Postcode Directory (ONSPD). GB postcode data is licensed under the Open Government Licence.

Contains OS data © Crown Copyright and database right. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail Copyright and database right. Contains National Statistics data © Crown Copyright and database right.

Manually Curated Data

Some data on School Atlas is researched and entered by our editorial team from publicly available sources. This includes:

• School fees— sourced from individual school websites. Fee figures are factual data presented in our own format. Always verify current fees directly with the school.
• Extracurricular activities— sourced from school websites and prospectuses.
• Facilities— sourced from school websites and virtual tours.
• Term dates— sourced from school websites.
• Wraparound care— breakfast clubs, after-school clubs, and holiday provision sourced from school websites.
• Awards and accolades— sourced from school websites, press releases, and awarding body announcements.
• House systems— sourced from school websites.
• Social media links— public social media profile URLs as published by schools.

This curated data is presented for informational purposes. While we take care to ensure accuracy, information may become outdated. If you are a school and notice an error, please contact us and we will correct it promptly.

School-Provided Enrichment Data

Schools that have claimed their profile on School Atlas can provide additional enrichment data directly, including facilities, notable alumni, house systems, extracurricular activities, and other details. This information is submitted by authorised school representatives and is clearly attributed as school-provided.

Notable Alumni

Information about notable alumni is limited to public figures whose school attendance is documented in publicly available sources such as Wikipedia. We only include individuals who meet the following criteria:

• The individual is a public figure (e.g. politician, author, sportsperson, scientist)
• Their attendance at the school is documented in a verifiable public source
• We link to the relevant Wikipedia article for verification

We process this data under the legitimate interest lawful basis (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)). Our Legitimate Interest Assessment is available for review. If you are listed and wish to be removed, please contact us.

University Destinations

University destination data is sourced from the Department for Education's Destination Measures, published via Explore Education Statistics. This covers state-funded schools. We present this as aggregated statistics (e.g. percentage attending Russell Group universities) and attribute the data under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Our Crawler & Opt-Out

When we need to fetch a page or file from a public website, our crawler identifies itself transparently with the following User-Agent string:

SchoolAtlas/1.0 (+https://schoolatlas.co.uk/data-sources)

We follow these rules on every request:

• We fetch and respect each site's robots.txt before any request, including Allow, Disallow, and Crawl-delay directives.
• We do not spoof a browser User-Agent. If a site blocks our transparent UA, we treat that as intent and do not bypass it.
• We rate-limit ourselves and favour official bulk downloads and APIs over per-page scraping wherever possible.
• We only fetch publicly accessible pages — no authenticated areas, no paywalled content, no membership directories.

Opt out:If you operate a website and would prefer that School Atlas not include or fetch your school's pages, email us at data@schoolatlas.co.uk with the domain(s) and/or URN(s) you want excluded. We will add them to our crawler's skip-list within 7 days and confirm in writing. You can also block us via robots.txt by disallowing the SchoolAtlas user-agent — we honour it automatically.

Your Data

For information about how we collect, use, and protect your personal data as a user of School Atlas, please see our Privacy Policy.

Corrections & Takedown Requests

We are committed to data accuracy and respecting intellectual property rights. If you believe any data on School Atlas is inaccurate, out of date, or infringes your rights, please contact us at hello@schoolatlas.co.uk and we will investigate and take appropriate action promptly.

Licence Summary