Secondary Insights

The colours only tell you which school a bar belongs to. They are assigned in the order you add schools, never by rank, so a green bar is not a good result and an orange one is not a warning.

Because that is easy to misread, every bar is labelled with its school’s name, and a key stays in view as you scroll.

Colour does carry meaning in two places. On the map and the intake chart, dots run from blue (above what the intake predicts) through grey to red (below). The Ofsted chips follow Ofsted’s own scale.

Progress 8 measures how much pupils improved between their key stage 2 tests at the end of primary school and their GCSEs. This year’s Year 11 should have sat those tests in summer 2020, when they were cancelled, so the Department for Education (DfE) published no progress measure for 2024-25. Every Progress 8 figure here is from 2023-24 and labelled as such. Raw results mainly track how affluent a school’s intake is, so the intake comparison is the column to rely on.

The “Attainment level” control above the school table switches the Progress 8 column, and its sort order, to the figure for pupils who started secondary school as lower, middle or higher attainers, judged by their primary school test results. It uses 2023-24, the last year published, and covers 3,044 schools.

Schools really do suit different children. A school’s Progress 8 for lower attainers correlates only 0.66 with its figure for higher attainers, so more than half the variation depends on the group. Of the 2,913 schools with figures for both, 786 do better for lower attainers by more than half a grade per subject, and 126 do better for higher attainers by the same margin. The headline figure averages all of this away.

The compare panel shows all three groups side by side, plus a tilt figure: positive means the school does more for its higher attainers, negative the reverse. Check the intake rows underneath as well. If only 4% of a school’s pupils are lower attainers, that figure rests on very few children.

Built from the DfE’s subject-level data: 747,655 rows covering every school, qualification and grade. It shows what each school actually entered pupils for last year, which can differ from what the prospectus promises.

Two findings worth taking to an open evening. Qualifications per pupil correlates +0.61 with Progress 8, more strongly than anything here except attainment itself, so schools that enter pupils for more usually get more out of them. And the vocational share of entries correlates −0.42 with Progress 8 and +0.41 with disadvantage: schools with poorer intakes are more likely to narrow the curriculum.

Triple science (separate GCSEs in biology, chemistry and physics) shows the sharpest divide. In the least deprived quarter of schools, 97% enter pupils for it and 38 pupils in every 100 take it. In the most deprived quarter, it is 78% of schools and 16 pupils in 100. If it matters for your child, ask the school directly.

One reassuring result: arts entries correlate +0.01 with Progress 8, which is to say not at all, and only −0.11 with disadvantage. A strong arts offer does not come at the cost of academic results, and the arts are the most evenly spread part of the curriculum.

Ofsted changed its inspection framework on 10 November 2025. Inspections since then produce a report card that grades each area separately (achievement, curriculum and teaching, attendance and behaviour, inclusion, leadership and governance, personal development, and sixth form where relevant) on a five-point scale from exceptional to urgent improvement. There is no longer a single overall grade.

Between September 2024 and November 2025, single-word grades had already been dropped but report cards had not yet started, so many schools inspected in that window have no grade at all. Before that, schools received one overall grade: outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.

Of the 3,294 schools here, 531 have a report card, 1,750 have an older overall grade, and the rest have neither. The page shows whichever exists, always labelled with its framework and inspection date, and never merges the two. A grade from 2017 and a report card from 2026 are different kinds of judgement and should not be compared.

Every school you compare has a direct link to its Ofsted page, on its card and beside the inspection date. The full reports are worth reading: a grade is one word, and the report explains it.

The DfE used to publish, for each sixth form, the share of students going on to a Russell Group university (24 leading research universities) and to Oxford or Cambridge. It stopped in October 2024, saying the figures no longer fed into accountability measures. So 2022-23 is the latest year available, covering students who started sixth form around 2020, and the figures are labelled with that year.

Read them as a guide to intake more than to teaching. Russell Group progression correlates +0.77 with Attainment 8. Against the headline figure, which allows for intake including primary results, it falls to +0.33; leave primary results out and it would be +0.52. Most of the link is who a school admits. Selective (grammar) schools send a median 45% of students to Russell Group universities against 17% for non-selective schools, and have 8% disadvantaged pupils against 28%.

For most families the Oxbridge figure tells you very little. The national median is zero, and 886 of the 1,741 sixth forms here sent nobody. A school showing 0% is normal, not a warning sign.

The “top third of providers” measure above is still published and is the current official equivalent. It ranks universities by the average entry qualifications (UCAS tariff) of their students rather than by membership of a group. Its definition changed in October 2024, so do not compare figures from either side of that date.

From the DfE’s applications and offers data for 2026 entry: how many places each school offered, how many families listed it, and in what order of preference. It covers 3,164 of the schools here.

Look at first preferences per place, not total preferences. A figure above 1 means more families put the school first than it had places. It correlates +0.46 with Progress 8 and +0.53 with Attainment 8, so parents’ first choices do track quality reasonably well. Total preferences is weaker, at +0.40, because it mixes real demand with families’ back-up choices.

But popularity is not a quality measure. It follows affluence: the most sought-after quarter of schools has 19% disadvantaged pupils, against 39% in the least sought-after quarter. Geography plays a part too. An isolated school can look unpopular simply because few families can realistically apply.

One trap. The most oversubscribed schools in England on this measure are mostly all-through schools (schools that run from primary age upwards). Most of their Year 7 places go to their own primary pupils, leaving only a handful for outside applicants. Woodmansterne offers 24 external places and looks three times oversubscribed, which is not comparable with a school offering 180. These schools are flagged in the table.

National medians: 179 places, 416 preferences, 2.23 preferences per place, 0.95 first preferences per place, and 88% of places going to families who put the school first.

From the school workforce census: the share of a school’s teachers who leave each year, whether for another state school or out of teaching altogether. It is shown as a three-year average because single years jump around: turnover correlates only 0.46 with the previous year’s figure, against 0.90 for persistent absence.

Its link to results is weak: −0.27 with Progress 8 and only −0.15 with the intake-adjusted figure. Adding it to the model after absence improves the explained variation by 0.002, which is effectively nothing. It also rises with disadvantage (+0.37), so much of what it seems to show is really intake.

Some signal survives. Split schools into quarters by turnover and use the intake-adjusted figure, so disadvantage is already allowed for: the lowest-turnover quarter sits 0.8 Attainment 8 points above what its intake predicts, and the highest-turnover quarter 0.9 points below. That is a gap of nearly two points on top of intake. Treat a high figure as a question for an open evening, not a verdict.

The national median is 15.5% a year, and falling: 17.2%, 15.6% and 13.2% across the three years.

From the DfE’s full-year figures for 2024-25, the same year as the results. Three measures: the share of pupils suspended at least once, the overall suspension rate (which counts repeat suspensions), and permanent exclusions.

Testing showed suspensions say little about results. They correlate −0.44 with Progress 8, weaker than persistent absence at −0.66, and +0.58 with absence itself, so the two overlap heavily. Added to the intake model after absence, the suspension rate improves explained variation by just 0.001.

They are here because they answer a different question. Absence tells you who is missing; suspensions tell you how a school handles behaviour, and two schools with identical results can be run very differently. Look at pupils suspended at least once rather than the total rate, which a few pupils suspended repeatedly can inflate. National medians for 2024-25: 6.9 pupils suspended at least once per 100, 15.1 suspensions per 100, and 0.14 permanent exclusions per 100.

This was tested against three years of data for 3,240 schools, not assumed. After the results themselves, persistent absence is the most useful single figure on this page. A pupil counts as persistently absent if they miss 1 day in 10 or more, about 19 school days a year. That is a share of pupils, not of days: a school with 20% persistent absence still has most pupils in on any given day. It correlates −0.73 with Attainment 8, more strongly than disadvantage does (−0.58), and −0.66 with Progress 8. Adding it to the intake model raises the share of variation explained from 64% to 74%; each percentage point of persistent absence is worth about half an Attainment 8 point. It is also stable from year to year (0.90), so one year’s figure is not a fluke.

Attainment figures are the most stable of all: Attainment 8 correlates 0.96 with the previous year, English and maths 5+ 0.93, EBacc entry 0.90. Disadvantage barely moves (0.99), which is exactly why raw results largely restate a school’s intake.

The disadvantage gap is the weakest figure here, and it carries a warning. It is the difference in results between disadvantaged pupils (broadly, those eligible for Pupil Premium funding) and everyone else. It holds only 0.52 from one year to the next and correlates −0.03 with Progress 8, which is to say not at all. A wide gap might mean a school is failing its poorer pupils, or simply that it has few of them and a long tail. Treat it as a question to ask, never a verdict.

Single years are also noisier for small schools. With fewer than 60 pupils in a year group, Attainment 8 typically swings 3.7 points between years, and one school in ten swings 9.5. Above 250 pupils, the typical swing is 1.4. That is why the table leads with three-year averages and a trend line rather than the latest year alone.

A statistical model (a least-squares regression) predicts each school’s Attainment 8 from its intake: the year group’s average key stage 2 score from primary school, disadvantage, English as an additional language, SEN support, education, health and care (EHC) plans for pupils with the highest needs, and whether the school is selective. It is fitted across all three years at once, 9,742 school-years with an adjustment for each year, and explains 80% of the variation. The figure shown is a school’s average gap between actual and predicted Attainment 8, in points.

Primary results. Key stage 2 averages are published for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 year groups. The 2024-25 year group has none, because its tests were cancelled in 2020, so for that year each school’s own average from the other two stands in. Tested on 2023-24, using the previous year’s average instead of the real one moves a single year’s figure by a median of 1.4 points, and it is one year of three. A school that changed its official number (the URN) when it became an academy or changed trust takes its predecessor’s primary results, found through the Department’s academy transfers list or, failing that, the same postcode: 61 schools. Eleven schools have no primary results under any number and get no figure.

Why primary results are in. Without them, the figure tracked how able a school’s intake was at +0.39, so schools with strong intakes looked better than they were. Kingsdale Foundation School admits 61% higher attainers, against a non-selective average of 22%; leaving primary results out puts it at +13.6, and allowing for them at +0.8. Non-selective schools in grammar-school areas, whose ablest children go elsewhere, were marked down by a median 2.1 points; allowing for primary results brings them to +0.1. A separate term for grammar-school areas was tested and added nothing. The compare panel still shows the figure without primary results, as a check: 194 schools score more than five points higher on the new figure, and 220 more than five lower.

It now agrees more closely with Progress 8, the Department’s own measure of progress from primary: +0.69 with 2023-24 Progress 8 and +0.68 with 2022-23, against +0.62 and +0.60 without primary results. 1,500 of 3,200 schools changed band when primary results went in, almost all by one step: 50 moved between above and below.

The ± figure is a 95% confidence interval, and it depends mostly on year-group size: about ±3.9 points for 60 pupils, ±2.3 for 150 and ±1.4 for 300. A school is only called above or below the line when that range clears zero. In the compare panel, the range is drawn on the bar.

The textbook fix was tested on the earlier version of this model and rejected: pulling each school’s figure towards the average in proportion to how noisy it is. Against actual Progress 8 it made results very slightly worse, because the real differences between schools are much larger than the year-to-year noise. Showing the uncertainty openly works better than hiding it inside an adjusted number.

What it still cannot see. A school’s average primary score, not each child’s, so it is not Progress 8. Single-sex schools still sit a little above the line (girls’ schools a median +1.5, boys’ +0.4, mixed −0.2); whether that is the schools or the families who choose them, the data cannot say, so it is left in.

Most independent (fee-paying) schools enter pupils for IGCSEs, which do not count towards DfE performance measures. As a result their average Attainment 8 appears as 34.5, against 46.7 for state schools, and half show 0% for grade 5 or above in English and maths. Those figures reflect how qualifications are counted, not how good the schools are, so including them would mislead.

SUPP means the figure covers five or fewer pupils and has been withheld to protect their privacy. NE means no pupils were entered. NP means not published. All three appear as a dash rather than a zero, because a withheld figure is not a bad one.

Schools are placed by their own full postcode, which is precise. Your location is less so. A full postcode is matched to its postcode sector (the part before the space plus the first digit after it), usually a village or a few streets. The typical error is 0.72 km, and under 2.9 km for nine postcodes in ten.

The part before the space on its own is about twice as rough: a typical error of 1.43 km, and up to 26.8 km in the largest rural districts, some of which stretch twenty miles end to end. Always enter the full postcode. The line under the results tells you which level of precision is in use.

Better still, click your exact location on the map. Every distance is then measured from that point. Distances are always straight lines, not walking or travel times.

None of this is an admissions cut-off. Councils publish those separately, they change every year, and they are measured from your front door.

Catchment areas (the zone a school gives priority to), faith admission criteria and travel times are not in any published national dataset, so they are not here. Ofsted judgements, suspensions, teacher turnover, applications and the parent survey have been added from separate releases. Admission cut-off distances come from the admissions booklets of five south London boroughs; the rest of England has none, because most councils do not publish them in a usable form.

So use this as a guide to how schools perform, not to where you will get a place. In most of London the distance cut-off decides admission, it changes every year, and the council measures it from your front door rather than from the middle of your postcode.