ofsted.london is a free, independent tool that makes UK government school data simple, searchable and useful for London parents making one of the most important decisions of their family life.
Choosing a school in London is genuinely hard. The official sources — Ofsted's own website, the DfE performance tables, the GIAS school register — contain excellent data but are difficult to navigate, slow to load, and almost impossible to compare across schools.
Parents deserve better. When you're trying to work out whether St Joseph's RC is better than the local community school, whether the commute from your flat to the school gate to the office is feasible, or whether a school's strong overall rating conceals a large disadvantaged pupil gap — you shouldn't need to spend hours cross-referencing four different government websites.
ofsted.london brings all of that data into one place, presents it clearly, and adds tools — like the commute planner and the postcode radius search — that make the data genuinely actionable.
All data on ofsted.london comes from official UK government sources, updated annually:
The Get Information About Schools (GIAS) register, maintained by the Department for Education, provides the baseline information on every school in England — name, address, type, capacity, phase, and demographic data including Free School Meals eligibility and EAL proportions.
Ofsted management information provides inspection ratings (Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, Inadequate) and inspection dates for every school in England. We display the most recent available rating for each school.
The DfE KS2 school performance tables provide end-of-primary attainment data including Reading, Writing and Maths combined scores, progress scores for reading, writing and maths, and breakdowns by gender, disadvantaged pupils and EAL status.
House price data is sourced from the Land Registry UK House Price Index (HPI), which publishes median and average residential property prices by local authority area on a monthly basis.
The raw government data requires significant processing before it is useful. School address data, for example, assigns schools to local authority areas based on their funding authority — which means a school physically located in Greenwich might be listed as a Barnet school if it is administered by a Barnet multi-academy trust.
We correct these assignments using the postcodes.io API, which geocodes every school's postcode and returns its true geographic borough. Over 1,100 schools were reassigned to their correct geographic borough through this process.
We also strip formatting artefacts from the KS2 data (percentage signs embedded in numeric fields), handle missing values consistently (showing a dash rather than 0 or N/A), and calculate derived statistics like the disadvantaged pupil attainment gap and borough-level averages.
The pipeline is written in Python and runs once a year when the government publishes updated data, typically in September and October.
ofsted.london is a data presentation and navigation tool. It does not generate ratings, rankings, or recommendations of its own. Every data point shown is taken directly from official government sources.
We do not have any commercial relationship with any school, local authority, tutoring company, or admissions consultant. We receive no payment to feature, promote, or improve the ranking of any school. The "Beating the Odds" analysis page ranks schools using a transparent scoring methodology based entirely on publicly available data.
Ofsted ratings reflect a school's performance at a specific point in time and should be considered alongside other evidence. A school rated "Requires Improvement" two years ago may have improved significantly since inspection. A school rated "Outstanding" several years ago under the old inspection framework may look different under current criteria. We show inspection dates prominently to help users assess the recency of each rating.
This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Ofsted or the Department for Education.
We update the full dataset once a year, in September or October, when the Department for Education publishes updated KS2 performance tables and school register data. Ofsted inspection data is updated throughout the year as new inspections are published.
The "Generated at" timestamp visible in the page source reflects the date the data pipeline was last run. Individual Ofsted inspection dates are shown on each school page so you can see how recently each school was assessed.
If you notice incorrect or outdated information for a specific school, please contact us and we will investigate.
ofsted.london is built and maintained independently. If you have questions about the data, spot an error, or would like to discuss the site, you can reach us by email at: hello@ofsted.london
We welcome corrections, suggestions, and feedback from parents, teachers, governors and researchers. We are also happy to hear from journalists and researchers who would like to use the data for editorial or academic purposes.