About this map
Every state-funded school, college, nursery and childcare provider in England, plotted with its latest inspection outcome and an estimate of the area it draws pupils from.
England has more than 50,000 educational establishments, and the information parents need about them is scattered across three separate systems: the Department for Education's register of establishments, Ofsted's inspection records, and each admission authority's own published criteria. This map brings the first two together on one screen so you can start with where you live rather than with a list of school names.
Finding schools near you
- Search your postcode in the search bar. The map centres on it and shows every establishment within range.
- Narrow by phase using the school-type filters — primary, secondary, further education, special and alternative provision, independent, and nurseries are separate layers. Turning off the ones you do not need makes a crowded urban map readable.
- Click a pin for the full record: phase, type, age range, capacity, inspection outcome and date, and a link to the school's own Ofsted report.
- Turn on catchment estimates to see roughly how far each school draws from.
- Add the deprivation layer to see the kind of neighbourhood each school serves, which matters a great deal when comparing outcomes.
What the pins tell you
The letter on a pin is the phase — P for primary, S for secondary, N for nursery, SP for special and further provision, FE for colleges. The border colour distinguishes independent and selective establishments from mainstream state schools. The fill colour is the inspection outcome, from outstanding through to inadequate, with a separate shade for establishments that have not been judged under the current framework.
Establishments with no judgement are not a bad sign. New schools, recent academy conversions, and providers inspected by a body other than Ofsted all appear this way.
About the catchment layer
This is the part most often misread, so it is worth being blunt: the catchment rings are estimates, not boundaries. Most English schools have no legal catchment. They admit by published oversubscription criteria, and where distance is the deciding factor the effective catchment is simply how far away the last child admitted lived that year — which changes annually and can collapse in a year with a large sibling cohort.
Use the rings to understand which schools realistically serve your address. Before making any decision that depends on getting a place, check the last-distance-offered figure published by the admission authority for that specific school and year.
Where the data comes from
Establishment records come from the Department for Education's register; inspection outcomes and dates come from Ofsted's published management information. Both are released under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and are refreshed periodically. Deprivation shading uses the English Indices of Deprivation 2025 from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Boundary geometry contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right.
Every record shows its inspection date so you can judge how current it is. Schools merge, convert and rename, so errors do creep in — if you spot one, tell us and we will fix it.
Read more
Our full guide explains how oversubscription criteria actually work, what an Ofsted judgement does and does not cover, and why intake makes comparing grades across different kinds of neighbourhood misleading.