GIAS, Ofsted and DfE benchmarking: what each file is for

Four government services publish nearly everything worth knowing about an English school, and each one answers a different question. Most of the confusion in this sector comes from asking a file the question it was never designed to answer.

GIAS is the register: who the school is. Name, unique reference number, establishment type, phase, local authority, academy trust link, pupils on roll, address, and the head teacher name as published. It is the spine that everything else joins to, because the URN it assigns is the key every other dataset uses. It refreshes daily, which makes it the only genuinely current source of the four.

Ofsted answers how the school is judged. It arrives as a published monthly CSV of management information rather than a live API, so inspection data on any product built from it — including ours — is monthly, not daily. Anyone claiming real-time Ofsted data is either wrong or is polling individual report pages. The file carries old single-word grades and, since 10 November 2025, six-area report cards.

DfE Financial Benchmarking answers where the money goes, in categories. Consistent Financial Reporting returns cover maintained schools, Academies Accounts Returns cover academy trusts, and both are annual. The important limitation: it publishes spend by category such as ICT, catering and premises, and it never names a supplier. Nobody can honestly tell you who a school already buys from using this source, and a product that claims otherwise is inferring it.

Find a Tender answers who is winning the work. Every award notice published under the Procurement Act since 24 February 2025 sits here, including below-threshold awards, and it does name suppliers. It is published continuously; we read it weekly. This is the only one of the four that tells you about an actual buying decision rather than a characteristic of the school.

A fifth source is often confused with the fourth: DfE spend over £25,000. That is the Department for Education publishing its own transactions. The payees are councils, agencies and national suppliers, and the rows carry no school URN. It is a useful picture of who sells to the department, and it is not a record of what any individual school buys.

Read together the four answer: who the school is, how it is judged, roughly where its money goes, and who has recently won work from it. No single file answers a sales question on its own, which is the entire reason for joining them.