Statistics at DfE

The Department for Education publishes official statistics on education and children.

We produce official statistics on:

  • early years
  • schools
  • further education
  • higher education
  • children and young people

This is carried out in line with the code of practice for official statistics and DfE official statistics: standards and policies.

Upcoming publications

Upcoming official statistics publications are announced on the statistics release calendar.

Upcoming ad hoc statistics and data releases

These are not part of our regular official statistics publications and are published on explore education statistics (EES) or GOV.UK.

Publication date Time Release type Release title
5 December 2024 9:30am other DfE external data shares
06 March 2025 9:30am other DfE external data shares
05 June 2025 9:30am other DfE external data shares
11 September 2025 9:30am other DfE external data shares
04 December 2025 9:30am other DfE external data shares

Explore education statistics (EES)

Use the explore education statistics (EES) service to:

  • find official statistics
  • download and explore data
  • find ad hoc statistics
  • find transparency data

All other ad hoc statistics and other transparency data can be found in the DfE transparency data section of GOV.UK.

Historic publications published before March 2020 can be found on GOV.UK. Statistics before May 2010 can be found in the UK government web archive.

Find and compare the performance of schools and colleges in England

Use the compare school and college performance service to:

  • review school and college performance data in your local area
  • view test and exam results
  • view Ofsted ratings
  • view a range of other information

Benchmark your school’s financial data

Use the school’s financial benchmarking service to:

  • compare your income and expenditure to similar schools and academy trusts
  • visualise the information using benchmarking charts
  • access data to build relationships with other schools and academy trusts

Statistics for higher education are also published by:

Statistics related to qualifications are published by Ofqual and the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ).

Ofsted publish statistics related to their inspections and outcomes.

Education is devolved in the UK and each country’s government publishes statistics on its separate system. These are available at:

Contact us

If you have a specific query, contact details are available at the bottom of each statistical publication.

To provide general feedback regarding statistics, you can contact [email protected]. If you have a media enquiry, you can contact the press Office on 020 7783 8300. If you have a general enquiry about education or DfE, contact 0370 000 2288.

DfE statistics news and announcements

13 November 2023: get involved in our Explore education statistics user research

The Department for Education has been publishing official statistics on the Explore education statistics service since 2020. We are committed to improving the service for the wide range of users who want and need easy access to our statistics.

Feedback from users is essential to this, so we are running a refresh user engagement project to revisit our user groups and core research. This will gather insights on user experiences, and any challenges they currently face when making use of our published statistics.

To get involved, users can fill in our survey. We expect this to take approximately 10 minutes to complete. The survey also includes an option to register for a follow up interview with a user researcher.

If you have any questions or concerns, email [email protected].

Delphine Robineau, Head of Profession for Statistics

5 May 2023: corrections to the childcare and early years providers survey 2022

An error has been identified which affects results from the childcare and early years providers survey: 2022. Revised figures were published on 5 May 2023.

The error came about because a small number of childcare providers (approximately 0.9% of the providers that responded to the survey) were incorrectly counted in the statistics. They should not have been included, because they do not provide childcare to children aged 0 to 4.

The error has been thoroughly investigated. As a result of the error, previously published estimates of the total number of childcare providers in England were approximately 600 (or 1.0%) higher than they should have been. Estimates of the total number of paid childcare staff in England were approximately 5,400 (or 1.6%) higher than they should have been.

Further details of the error and the effect it had on the figures are provided in the methodology section of the corrected statistics. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

David Simpson, Head of Profession for Statistics

5 July 2022: technical issue with key stage 2 attainment statistics

This morning, DfE released national headline statistics on key stage 2 attainment. There were technical issues with our explore education statistics platform that meant the statistics were not available at 9:30am. These issues were unrelated to those experienced by schools accessing their individual results.

Once this issue was identified, as an interim solution, the statistics were made available through an accessible PDF document that went live on GOV.UK at approximately 10:45am. The issues with the explore education statistics platform have now been rectified, with statistics available through that platform at approximately 11:10am.

I would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused and to assure you that I take the issue very seriously. We are reviewing the website and any improvements that can be made to avoid this happening again in future.

Neil McIvor, DfE Chief Statistician

13 June 2022: Changes to the publication of the FE Choices learner satisfaction survey

The FE Choices learner satisfaction surveys 2019 to 2020 and 2020 to 2021 were cancelled due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

In 2020 to 2021, the Department for Education (DfE) conducted the FE COVID-19 learner and apprentice experience survey to understand the experiences of FE learners during the COVID-19 outbreak. This was published in April 2022.

DfE does not intend to run the satisfaction survey again in its current form. DfE will instead be considering the most useful information to collect from learners that best supports the proposals laid out in last year’s public consultation document Skills for Jobs: a new further education funding and accountability system, taking into account the responses to that consultation.

Neil McIvor, DfE Chief Statistician

3 February 2022: Correction to apprenticeship national achievement rates

An error has been discovered which affects the 2019 to 2020 national apprenticeship achievement rate, which was originally published in March 2021 in the apprenticeships and traineeships release.

The error has identified people who had withdrawn from their apprenticeship programme but who, at the time of publishing, were thought to have continued into the next year.

In line with the code of practice for statistics, we have taken down rates for 2019 to 2020 until new data is available. This only impacts on the section in the release headed ‘National Achievement Rate Tables’ (NARTs). Other areas of the release are not affected. I would like to apologise for this error and for the data being unavailable while the updated figures are calculated.

My teams need to complete the full production cycle for 2020 to 2021 in order to provide new data for 2020 to 2021 and revisions to any preceding years, which will include full quality assurance of the 2019 to 2020 data.

The error is likely to lead to a reduction to the overall 2019 to 2020 rate that was previously published, but the size of the impact can only be robustly quantified once the revised data is calculated. This revised data for 2019 to 2020 will form part of the national high-level 3-year time series, containing data for 2018/2019 to 2020/2021, which is scheduled for publication in March 2022. Once that data has been calculated and quality assured, national level data for 2019 to 2020 will be available again.

In publishing the 2019 to 2020 NARTs in March 2021, the release did not contain any provider-level data, including provider type following the government’s announcement that the data would not be used for accountability purposes. The release only covered high-level national aggregations which are made available for transparency only.

For provider-level data, you should use the last full data published for 2018 to 2019.

Neil McIvor, DfE Chief Statistician

28 January 2021: Correction to workforce absence data for teaching assistants and other staff

An error was identified that affected national level absence rates for ‘teaching assistants and other staff’ published on 19 January in the ‘Attendance in education and early years settings during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak’ statistical publication.

The affected data were removed from the publication on 27 January and corrected on 28 January. Known users of this data are being contacted directly to alert them to this correction.

The error meant that absence rates were overreported for ‘teaching assistants and other staff’ at national level. The corrected data shows that teaching assistants and other staff have broadly similar absence rates to teachers and school leaders.

A full list of affected measures and further details about the cause of this error is available in the methodology section of the release. Data used by government as management information, as set out in the ‘data sharing’ section of the publication, was unaffected.

I would like to apologise for this error and assure you that I take the issue of data quality very seriously. We are reviewing how this was missed through our checking processes to improve them in future.

Neil McIvor, DfE Chief Statistician

Contents