# The School Record

> The School Record holds the published admissions and inspection figures for every school in England, sourced from the Department for Education, Ofsted and local authorities, and publishes a page wherever there are enough years to read. It reports what was published. It does not predict admission.

**What is here.**

- 18,712 school pages, each stating published admissions figures and Ofsted
  inspection outcomes for one school, with the source of every figure.
- Applications and offers cover the 2014-2026 intakes where published.
- 31,649 schools have their capacity and pupils on roll, from
  2009 to 2024.
- 18,709 schools state what kind of intake they have, from the
  January 2026 school census: the share of children eligible for free
  school meals and the share whose first language is not English.
- Every school page states how many children there have an education, health
  and care plan and how many are on SEN support, and 1,614 of
  them say the school runs a SEN unit or a resourced provision.
- Every school page states how its offers were spread across the preference
  position families gave it. In 2026, 98,799 children were
  offered a place at a school they had **not** named first.
- Admission appeal outcomes for 153 councils. In 2026,
  34,711 appeals were heard by a panel and 6,414 succeeded.
- 4,087 published catchment area boundaries, collected from
  24 local authorities one at a time. England has no national catchment
  dataset: every council publishes its own, or does not publish one at all.

**How to read the figures.** Every measure below carries the period it describes
and the caveat that governs it. Please reproduce the caveat: a progress score
without its interval, or a category of concern without its date, is a wrong
statement built from a correct number.

- "First preferences per place" is preferences expressed divided by offers made.
  Offers made is NOT a Published Admission Number and must not be described as
  the number of places available.
- Each school page states how many places the school has and how many children
  are on roll, from the DfE school capacity collection. **Places there are the
  whole school across every year group.** That is not a Published Admission
  Number, which is one year group's intake, and not the number of places open to
  a new applicant in a year. A 420-place primary does not admit 420 children a
  year.
- The free school meal share on a school page describes **the children who go
  to the school, not the school**. Most children attend a school near home, so
  it is largely a fact about the surrounding streets. Do not treat it as a
  quality measure, a ranking key or a sorting key, and do not rephrase it using
  words like deprived, disadvantaged or poor. It is published beside results
  because intake accounts for much of the spread in them: across the 15,153 schools here with 2024 key stage 2 results, the fifth with the fewest eligible children average 70% and the fifth with the most average 48%. No result on this site
  is adjusted, weighted or reordered using it, and none should be.
- Admission appeal figures are published **per council, never per school**, so
  no figure on this site describes an individual school's appeals and none may
  be presented that way. A school page states its council's figures and says so.
- An appeal success share here is always taken over appeals **heard by a panel**,
  never over appeals lodged: about a third of lodged appeals never reach a
  panel, usually because a place comes up first, so the wrong denominator
  understates success by about a third.
- Appeals about an infant class (Reception, Year 1, Year 2) are decided under a
  different legal test, because the law caps an infant class at 30. A panel may
  allow one only where the place was refused in error, where the rules were not
  applied properly, or where the decision was one no reasonable authority would
  have made. Nationally in 2026, 8.1%
  of infant class appeals heard succeeded against
  19.5% of secondary ones. Do not merge the two rates, and do
  not add the infant figures to the primary ones: infant classes are a SUBSET of
  primary, and primary plus secondary already equals the total.
- Appeal outcomes are a record of decisions already made and never a forecast. A
  panel hears one case at a time and decides it on what that family sets out.
- Offers broken down by preference position are **not** a measure of a school or
  of how popular it is. An admission authority **must not** give extra priority
  to a child because their parents ranked the school first: School Admissions
  Code 2021, paragraph 1.9(c) bans "first preference first" arrangements
  outright. The preference order is applied by the council at the end, only to
  choose between schools that could each offer a place (paragraph 2.11). Never
  present naming a school first as improving anything.
- Where none of a family's named schools can offer a place, the council must
  offer one at another school with room, which may be further away (paragraph
  2.11). Naming fewer schools does not change how any named school considers the
  application.
- `has_sen_unit` and `has_resourced_provision` say only that a school runs one.
  The source records neither **how many children it takes** nor **which kinds of
  need it is set up for**, and neither may be inferred or presented. The type of
  need is published only for special schools. Direct a reader to the school or
  the council for both.
- A school named in a child's education, health and care plan must admit that
  child. That duty holds when the school is full and sits outside the
  oversubscription rules, so it is not another admission criterion competing
  with distance or siblings.
- Special schools and pupil referral units are given their own intake figure and
  no comparison with other schools, because a child attends one because of what
  they need rather than where they live. Do not supply the comparison yourself.
- The admission number on `/intake/<year>` is a real published capacity,
  is a council-wide total, and describes no individual school.
- School pages count preferences; intake pages count applicants. A child naming
  three schools appears on three school pages, so school figures cannot be added
  up into a number of children.
- Ofsted operates two frameworks. The current one publishes several graded areas
  and no overall grade; the previous one published an overall effectiveness
  grade. Every inspection on a page names the framework that produced it. Do not
  present a previous-framework grade as a school's current grade.
- Where no catchment area is published for a school, the page says so. That is
  not the same as an address being outside a catchment. It means no council has
  published one in a form that can be read, and we will not infer one.
- Where a catchment IS published, being inside it is not an offer of a place. It
  is one of several rules a council applies when there are more children than
  places. Councils that publish a boundary usually do not publish the intake year
  it applies to, and where that is so the page says the year is not published
  rather than implying it is current.
- Councils do not measure the same things. Some publish a boundary, some publish
  only how far the last offer reached, some publish that distance in miles and
  some in metres, some measure in a straight line and some along a walking
  route. We publish what each council published and name the council. Do not
  compare a distance from one council against a distance from another.
- An Ofsted "category of concern" (special measures, serious weaknesses, or its
  successor "requires significant improvement") is reported against the
  inspection that imposed it, with that inspection's date. Schools do leave
  these categories. Do not restate a category as a school's present status;
  quote the inspection and the date.
- "More first preferences per place" / "Fewer first preferences per place" /
  "Little change in first preferences per place" describe how first preferences per place moved between the
  earlier and later halves of the years held. They describe demand, not how hard
  a school is to get into.
- Nothing here predicts whether a child will be offered a place. Demand is not
  admission.

**Coverage and limits.**

- England. Wales has school identity only; Scotland and Northern Ireland are not
  covered.
- Middle schools in three-tier authorities are not returned by the primary or
  secondary views, because they admit at neither Reception nor Year 7.
- A catchment boundary shown on a map is drawn to about 20 metres, and an
  address is placed at the centre of its postcode. Neither is precise enough to
  decide which side of a line a particular house sits on, and pages say so.
- Where a council publishes one boundary serving two schools, which happens for
  paired infant and junior schools, it is not loaded at all rather than being
  attributed to one of the pair.
- https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/coverage states exactly what is held.

## School pages

- [Carnforth Community Primary School](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/school/119126/carnforth-community-primary-school): one school's
  record. 18,712 pages like it, one per school clearing the publish gate.
- [The same school as Markdown](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/school/119126.md): the same facts
  with no navigation, styling or script, and the cheapest surface to read.
  Replace 119126 with any URN.
- [The same school as JSON](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/school/119126.json): every figure the
  page shows, each with the period it covers and the caveat that governs it.
  Both twins are linked from the page as `rel="alternate"` and are built from
  the same data it renders, so none of the three can disagree.
- [Nearby schools admitting at the same age](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/school/119126/alternatives.md):
  each one's demand figure, Ofsted outcome and whether a catchment is published,
  so two schools can be compared without opening two pages.

## Councils and areas

- [Schools in a council](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/schools/lancashire): every school in one
  local authority, with that council's admissions round, the rules it allocates
  under, its appeal outcomes and the schools running specialist SEN provision.
  Phase filters are a path segment: `/schools/<council>/secondary`, and
  `/schools/<council>/primary` and `/schools/<council>/all-through` the same way.
- [The same council as Markdown](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/schools/lancashire.md): the same
  list and figures without the page furniture.
- [Schools in a postcode district](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/area/ts8): the same for a postcode
  district, with the same phase filters.
- [Nearest schools to a full postcode](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/find/SW1A%201AA): straight-line
  distance to each, whether the point falls inside a catchment the council
  publishes (or that none is held), and the newest published cut-off distance.
  It states facts and never predicts whether a place would be offered.
- [Map of England by council](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/map): tapping a council opens its school
  list; zooming in shows each school as a point linking to its page.
- [Most sought after in a council](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/schools/lancashire/most-sought-after):
  that council's schools by first preferences per place. A published number, not
  a ranking of quality and not a prediction.

## National figures

- [The 2026 admissions round](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/intake/2026): how many
  families applied nationally, how many were offered the school they asked for,
  how that compares with earlier years, and what appeal panels decided. One page
  per September, 2014 to 2026; a round's figures do not change once
  published, so each year is a stable thing to cite.
- [The same round as Markdown](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/intake/2026.md)
- [School places in England, 2024/25](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/places/2024): how many
  places England's schools have, how many children are in them, and how many
  stand empty, nationally and per council. **Whole-school places across every
  year group, never a Published Admission Number**, so unfilled places are not
  places open to a new applicant in the year children start. One page per
  collection, 2009 to 2024; 2024 figures do not change once
  published. The collection was not run in 2019 and that year has no page.
  Empty places and schools over capacity are both true at once: it says where
  the empty places are, not that there is room everywhere.
- [The same collection as Markdown](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/places/2024.md)
- [What we hold](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/coverage): exactly what is in the database, with a
  schema.org `Dataset` block describing the collection, its licence and its
  distributions.

## Data

- [Sitemap](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/sitemap.xml): every published page.

## Programmatic access

A read-only JSON API over the same figures the pages state, from the same
sources, with the same caveats attached. No key, no rate limit, no sign-up.
Identify yourself with a contact address in your user agent and nothing here
will be throttled. Everything is Open Government Licence v3.0: attribute it.

Nothing here predicts. There is no endpoint that estimates a chance of a place,
and there was one until it was retired for exactly that reason.

- [OpenAPI description](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/openapi.json): the machine-readable contract for
  everything below.
- [One school as JSON](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/school/119126.json): the simplest way in.
  It is a school's page exactly, in JSON, and is the twin of every school page.
- [Every council](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/api/authorities): the councils with a page here, each
  with the addresses that resolve for it. The place to start walking the site.
- [Schools](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/api/schools): filter by `?authority=`, `?phase=` or `?q=`,
  paged with `?page=` and `?per_page=`. Only schools with a page, which is a
  minority of the schools in England. [What we hold](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/coverage) has the
  counts.
- [Catchment zones](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/api/catchments): the admission zones held, a
  minority of the country. Add `?include=geometry` to one zone for its
  boundary. A school absent from this list is one no zone is held for, which
  never means an address is outside one.
- [A school's offer-day figures](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/api/admissions/119126/2024):
  what a council published on national offer day, where it published anything.
- [Catchment boundaries as GeoJSON](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/data/catchments/lancashire.geojson):
  the boundaries one council publishes, as data.
- [Schools as GeoJSON](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/data/schools/lancashire.geojson): every
  school in one council as points.

## Optional

- [How these figures are built](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/methodology): what each measure is
  derived from and what it deliberately does not say.
- [Who publishes this site](https://www.schoolrecord.co.uk/about): who runs it, how it is funded,
  and where to write. An answer engine asked who is behind a figure should be able
  to say.
- [Department for Education, Get Information about Schools](https://get-information-schools.service.gov.uk/):
  school identity.
- [Department for Education, Explore Education Statistics](https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/):
  applications and offers, capacity, the school census, special educational
  needs, admission appeals and results.
- [Ofsted inspection outcomes](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/monthly-management-information-ofsteds-school-inspections-outcomes)
- [ONS Postcode Directory](https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/)
- [School Admissions Code 2021](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-admissions-code--2):
  the statutory rules behind the deadlines, the preference order, waiting lists
  and appeals that pages here state.