Data Sources & Methodology

School Nest brings together three different kinds of information:

1. Official public information — Published by government bodies and reproduced as it appears in the source.
2. Information published by schools — Written and maintained by schools that have claimed and verified their listing.
3. School Nest calculations — Values we work out from official inputs, such as the distance between a searched location and a school. These are always ours, not government measures.

We keep these apart throughout the service so you can always tell what is an official record and what a school has told us about itself.

The core England school directory comes from the Department for Education's Get Information About Schools service. It provides each school's name, unique reference number, type, phase, age range, address, local authority, status and other official establishment details.

School Nest currently covers England. Support for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland depends on their own official sources and is not yet part of the service.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

A school can claim its listing. Once we have checked the claim, staff at that school can publish additional information — a description, admissions details, photographs, open days and news. This content belongs to the school and is clearly separate from official records. It is not checked for accuracy by the Department for Education, and publishing it does not change any official information.

Where we calculate something from official inputs, we say so. At present the only calculated value shown to families is the distance between a searched postcode or place and a school.

• Postcode coordinates come from the official postcode centroid for the postcode you search, based on Office for National Statistics data.
• School coordinates come from the official grid reference published for each school, converted to latitude and longitude.
• The distance shown is straight-line (as the crow flies) distance between those two points.
• It is not a driving, walking or public transport distance, and it is not a guide to catchment areas or admission chances.
• Values are rounded for display — to one decimal place under ten miles, and to whole miles above that.

The Department for Education publishes updated school records every working day. School Nest checks for a new file each night and applies any changes, so official details normally reflect the source within a day. Information published by schools updates as soon as the school publishes it.

Where a value is not shown, it means the information has not been published for that school — not that the answer is zero or none. Some details apply only to certain types of school, and some schools have not yet added their own information.

If something looks wrong, please get in touch. Where the issue is in an official record, the Department for Education is the source of the correction and the change reaches School Nest through the next update; we will point you to the right place. Where the issue is in information published by a school, we will raise it with the school.

School Nest is an independent service. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated on behalf of the Department for Education or any other government body. Paying for a School Nest subscription never changes search order or any official information shown about a school.

We expect to use further official datasets as School Nest develops. Any dataset we add will be described on this page, with its source and licence, at the point it first appears in the service — never before.

Official school information shown on School Nest is reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.