Research and analysis

Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data guidance

Updated 3 December 2024

Applies to England

This guidance gives a summary of how to use Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data and notes on the data it contains.

The official statistics data that feeds into Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data is available on the Statistics at Ofsted page, and local authorities data can be found in the Local Authority Interactive Tool (LAIT).

Read our equality, diversity and inclusion statement.

If you want to contact us about this data or the guidance document, please email [email protected]

Introduction to Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data

Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data is an OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) that allows you to view Ofsted inspection data in an accessible way. You can view the overall effectiveness grades and sub-judgements between regions, local authority areas and government office regions for:

• children’s social care
• early years
• further education and skills providers
• non-association independent schools
• initial teacher education providers
• state-funded schools and academies (in Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data this remit is called ‘state-funded schools’)

Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data shows Ofsted inspection outcomes over 5 years. It will be updated with published data at various points throughout the year, linked to the release of Official Statistics. One can manipulate the data to show whether providers in an area are getting better over time. The same inspection data is published in Ofsted’s official statistics.

Column headers and definitions

Column headers for the Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data are defined in the ‘Key’ tab of each dataset.

Terminology

Terminology includes:

• Unknown: data is not available.
• Redacted: for security reasons, we do not publish identifiable data.
• Not recorded: the data for this record is either unavailable or was not reported on at the time the dataset was produced.
• Not available: at the time the original dataset was produced, this field wasn’t included for the corresponding remit.
• Not applicable: the data for the corresponding remit is not categorised according to this field.

Coverage

Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data shows ‘state of the nation’ data. This means it reports the most recent inspection judgement for all providers that are open and, where relevant, funded at a particular point in time, for example on 31 August 2022. This is very different to reporting of in-year inspection judgements for any particular year. State of the nation data gives a more balanced view of the quality of provision across the country at that point in time because it includes an inspection judgement for almost all providers. It inevitably includes some inspection judgements that were made several years ago and, in some cases, under a different inspection framework.

Data presented in Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data is released as management information. The data shows the most recent inspections for the majority of providers and does not include inspections unpublished at the previous OS release apart from further education and skills providers. See Ofsted’s official statistics.

Data included

From July 2018 the most recent inspection outcomes for state-funded schools include schools not inspected in their current form, where inspection details of a predecessor school are available. Details of the public consultation that led to this methodology change, and an analysis of changes provide a state of the nation picture based on providers open on 31 August or, for children’s social care providers, on 31 March.

Remit, provider, and provision types

Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data allows you to view the inspection outcomes of different groups of providers. The broadest category is ‘remit’. There are 6 remits shown in Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data:

• children’s social care
• early years
• further education and skills
• non-association independent schools
• initial teacher education
• state-funded schools

Within some remits, you can refine your search further. For example, within the early years remit, you can filter which type of provider you are interested in: childminder, childcare on non-domestic premises or childcare on domestic premises. Please note that certain provider details are redacted, as detailed in their respective official statistics methodology reports.

For state-funded schools and initial teacher education, you can filter on both provider types and phase to narrow down your search even further. For example, within state-funded schools, you could filter to view results for secondary schools that are also academy converters, or view results for primary free schools.

For children’s social care, you can filter provider or provision types and sector. For example, you can filter to view results for all types of children’s homes together or just for secure children’s homes. You can also filter the type of sector you want, such as local-authority-run children’s homes.

Location

For all remits, the provider’s location is determined by matching the postcode of the provider to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) postcode file. This is the source of information for the government office region, local authority area and parliamentary constituency in which the provider can be found. Where this has been marked as ‘Not available’, it is because this data has not been included in the corresponding Official Statistics due to differences between the location of the provider and the head office of the organisation operating the provider.

Postcodes from historical datasets remain unchanged and are accurate at the time of reporting, even if they have subsequently changed in the ONS postcode directory. The lower super output areas derived from this process are linked to the IDACI to determine the deprivation band of individual providers.

For further education and skills providers, the postcode given is for the provider’s main delivery location or head office. However, providers may operate from a number of locations. Where a provider is based outside England, the postcode provided is for its main delivery location within England.

Deprivation

The Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data allows you to view inspection outcomes for early years providers and state-funded schools with a particular level of deprivation.

The deprivation of an early years provider is the deprivation index associated with the provider’s location (lower super output area (LSOA)). The LSOAs are divided into 5 equal groups (quintiles) based on their IDACI score. These 5 groups are labelled from ‘most deprived’ to ‘least deprived’. The provider’s location determines which of these 5 groups it is allocated to. For example, the providers in the fifth of LSOAs with the highest deprivation index are described as ‘most deprived’.

The deprivation of a state-funded school is based on the mean of the deprivation indices associated with the pupils’ home postcodes, rather than the location of the school itself. This information is provided by the Department for Education. This information is not available for nursery schools, pupil referral units or hospital schools (a type of special school); therefore, they are excluded from analysis by deprivation. The schools are divided into five equal groups (quintiles) that are labelled from ‘most deprived’ to ‘least deprived’. For example, the fifth of schools nationally that have the highest IDACI scores are described as the ‘most deprived’.

Further information

Ofsted’s associated official statistics give further detailed information about the calculations and data within Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data.

Our reports website gives the latest judgements on individual providers. You can search for the provider you are interested in or select the provider from the ‘all provider’ panel in the provider view dashboard.

Send any enquiries about this tool to [email protected].

Background information

All inspections included in Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data are graded outcomes inspections. In addition to these, Ofsted also carries out a variety of other visits (known as ‘ungraded inspections’) including monitoring visits, registration visits and other regulation activity.

For independent schools, we only publish data on providers for which we are the inspectorate. As a result, Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data for independent schools will only report on a subset of all active independent schools at a point in time; schools inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) are not included.

Non-maintained special schools are categorised and analysed as state-funded (local authority maintained) schools.

Initial teacher education data does not currently include the provider type ‘primary/secondary’ if one set of judgements applies to both primary and secondary partnerships. As in previous years, these providers are included in both primary and secondary provider types. As such, aggregate figures will not exactly match those published elsewhere. More detailed data can be found in our official statistics releases.

Ofsted is now responsible for the regulation of supported accommodation providers. Inspection of these providers will commence from September 2024 and outcomes data will be released in line with the corresponding official statistics.

Some children’s social care provision types do not have places data because of the type of service they offer. These provision types are adoption support agencies, voluntary adoption agencies, fostering agencies, residential holiday schemes for disabled children, secure training centres, single inspection framework (local authorities) and local safeguarding children boards.

The children’s social care data on boarding schools shows the welfare inspection data for boarding schools that Ofsted inspects. Most boarding schools in England belong to associations that are members of the Independent Schools Council (ISC) and are therefore inspected by the ISC’s own inspectorate, the ISI. These schools are not inspected by Ofsted, so are not included in Five-Year Ofsted Inspection Data.

Within the state-funded schools’ data there may be some schools with ‘0’ pupil numbers. This might happen because pupil referral units and special schools have changing cohorts, so may not have had pupils when the census return was taken, or a school closed to become an academy after the census and no longer has a link with the census records of the closed school. These will be available once the school completes the next census with new pupil numbers. In this situation, pupil numbers will not be missing for more than 12 months.