SchoolDash - About

Mission

SchoolDash helps people and organisations to understand education through data. We work with consultancies, charities, companies and governments to enable them to better serve individual schools and the wider education system.

History

Our founder, Timo Hannay, was the founding managing director of Digital Science, a research software business. Before that he was variously director of nature.com, a consultant at McKinsey & Company, a writer for The Economist and a research neurophysiologist at the University of Oxford and Waseda University in Tokyo. He is a non-executive director of Sage Publishing, Arden University and EDUCATE Ventures Research, as well as a governor of The Henrietta Barnett School. He is also an advisor to Ada Lovelace Day and Maths4Girls.

Contact

We welcome feedback, suggestions and requests. Please write to us at [email protected]. You can also follow us on Twitter: @SchoolDash.

Data

This site uses information from multiple sources, particularly the UK Department for Education (DfE) and Office for National Statistics (ONS). We take great care to ensure that the data are correct, but there's so much of it that some errors are inevitable, both in the original sources and in our own analyses.

The data mostly concern state-funded schools in England. These include academies and free schools that are not under local authority control. Data for independent (ie, private) schools is limited because they do not submit the same level of information that state schools are required to provide. Data for schools in Wales are published separately but not yet included here. The governments in Scotland and Northern Ireland do not currently release school-level data.

The information presented mainly covers the period from 2011 to 2024, with new data added as soon as it is issued. Regular data updates are made on a weekly basis, usually over the weekend, though this schedule is sometimes adjusted for particularly significant new data releases.

Please also note that the DfE omits to publish certain subsets of data representing small numbers of pupils. This is mainly in order to protect children's privacy. (For example, if a school has only one or two children from a particular ethnic group then it may suppress data about the academic performance of that group because this could potentially be used to infer the academic perfomance of the individual children concerned. Information about the same children would typically still be included in data relating to other larger cohorts, such as year groups, where their privacy would not be at risk.) Such information has necessarily been omitted from our database. This doesn't significantly affect most analyses but can skew certain results, especially when looking at very specific pupil groups or particular schools.

In general, please take any surprising results with a pinch of salt, at least until you have verified them – something with which we can help. Similarly, before making important decisions based on any of the data presented here please take care to verify your understanding with us or with the school(s) concerned. If you spot a pattern that looks particularly interesting – or just plain wrong – then drop us a note at [email protected] and we'll look into it.

Insights

Our premium service, SchoolDash Insights, is a continually updated interactive dashboard of information covering a wide range of educational trends and activities at national, local and individual school levels. It is available only to members. For more information, please write to [email protected].

APIs

We also provide access to our data through bespoke application programming interfaces (APIs). Details available on request to [email protected].

Dashboards

Our free Dashboards cover around 40,000 schools and other educational institutions in England. These currently provide a profile of each school or institution, including details such as location and contact information, staff and pupil composition, budget, Ofsted ratings and links to a variety of external resources.

They also include lists of nearby and similar schools. The similar school lists are generated by comparing the characteristics of the respective pupils populations. For example, the age ranges and sex ratios of the pupils as well as the proportions who are economically deprived or who have particular educational needs. The most similar schools apear at the top of the list. We're continuing to refine this algorithm, so don't be surprised to see these lists change. In recognition of their unique status, we don't currently try to provide lists of similar schools for institutions such as special schools or pupil referral units.

Families

The Schools Guide is our free, groundbreaking service for pupils and families searching for a suitable primary or secondary school in England.

Retirements

Our Maps and Explorer sections are no longer updated and should not be used, though we continue to keep them online just for the record. Much richer, more up to date information is now available through SchoolDash Insights.

Browsers

Use of this website requires an up-to-date web browser such as Firefox, Safari or Chrome. Pages should display correctly on mobile devices, but some of the more information-heavy visualisations may be slow to load over low-bandwidth connections.

Attribution

You may reproduce selected data and images from the dashboards and maps on this site provided that you give attribution to "SchoolDash.com". If you're publishing online then please include a link too. You may not systematically download multiple of pages, images or data sets, or reproduce any of the information in a wholesale fashion. If in doubt, please contact us at [email protected].

Privacy

This website complies with all UK national laws and requirements for user privacy.

Cookies: We do not use cookies, but we do use Google Analytics which employs cookies to track visitor usage. Google's software will save one or more cookies (small text files) on your computer in order to track and monitor your engagement and usage of the website. It will not collect or store personal information. You can read Google's privacy policy here.

Contacts: Users contacting us do so at their own discretion. Any personal information you provide is kept private and stored securely until it's no longer required. Your details will not be passed on to any third parties.

Links: We do not take responsibility for the contents of any external websites to which we link.

Acknowledgements

This site uses data obtained mainly from the UK Department for Education (DfE) and Office for National Statistics (ONS). Particular thanks are due to numerous staff at the DfE for help in obtaining and understanding the data they gather so assiduously. The terms and licence under which data are made available from the ONS require us to include the following copyright statements:

Finally, thanks to the creators of the free and open-source software projects on which we rely, especially Bootstrap, jQuery, D3.js, NVD3, spin.js and QGIS.