About Good School Finder

Good School Finder is a free, map-based way to explore UK schools: search any postcode to see the schools around it, filter by age phase, compare their latest Ofsted outcomes, and read the area guides. Everything is free, nothing is behind a paywall.

Who runs this, and why

Good School Finder is built and run by an independent technology professional with a family. I've been through the stress of choosing both a primary school and a secondary school for my own daughter. Being a techie, I appreciate both maps and data, so thought it would be handy to bring the two together for other parents going through the same thing.

Keeping the data current

Data ages. Schools improve and decline. Ofsted processes evolve. New data is published regularly. Good School Finder is updated regularly to show the latest official data. We'll also show where our data has come from, so that you can check it's up to date and refer to the original for more detail if you want to. We'll make it clear where a school has only been through a lighter-touch interim inspection or has an older grading. There may still be some lag between an Ofsted publication and it appearing here; for the definitive, up-to-the-minute record, always check the official Ofsted reports site.

How the Good School Finder score works

Ofsted abolished single overall grades in 2024 and is moving schools onto new report cards that grade several areas separately. The two systems measure different things and are not directly comparable, so we don't merge them. Instead we present them side by side, so that all schools are represented.

To let you rank a whole area at a glance, we compute our own Good School Finder score — a single 0–100 number derived from whichever framework applies to a school:

Older single-grade inspections map to fixed anchors: Outstanding = 100, Good = 75, Requires improvement = 40, Inadequate = 0.
New report cards average the per-area grades (on a 5-point scale) onto the same 0–100 range.
Some 2024–25 inspections graded the individual areas but gave no single overall grade; for those we average the area grades onto the same range, so a recently-inspected school is judged on what it was actually given.
When scores tie, we break ties deterministically by safeguarding outcome, then inspection recency, then school name — so rankings are stable and reproducible.

The score is a ranking heuristic to help you compare and shortlist — it is not an official Ofsted judgement. Always check the school's full inspection for the detail behind the grade.

Data sources & credits

It's been built using:

School register data (type, status, admissions and more) from the Department for Education’s Get Information about Schools, © Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0
School performance data (exam and assessment results) from the Department for Education’s Compare school and college performance, © Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0
UK postcode data from the Office for National Statistics (ONSPD), Open Government Licence v3.0
Neighbourhood (postcode district) names from OS Open Names — Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right; Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right; National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right
Map data from OpenStreetMap under the Open Database License
Leaflet to display the map in the application

Questions, corrections or feedback are welcome — see the contact page.