What replaced Ofsted grades, explained

For roughly three decades an Ofsted inspection ended in one word. Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement or Inadequate was applied to the whole school, and that word travelled everywhere: into league tables, estate agent listings, local news and the opening line of every sales email sent to the head.

Inspections carried out from 10 November 2025 do not produce that word. They produce a report card, which judges the school separately across six areas: inclusion; curriculum and teaching; achievement; attendance and behaviour; personal development and well-being; and leadership and governance.

Each area is judged on a five-point scale: exceptional, strong standard, expected standard, needs attention, urgent improvement. Safeguarding sits outside that scale entirely and is recorded as met or not met. So a modern inspection outcome is not one judgement but seven, and they frequently disagree with each other.

That is the part worth internalising if you sell into schools. Under the old system a Good school and a Good school looked identical on paper. Under report cards, two schools both broadly performing well can be in completely different states: one needing attention on attendance and behaviour, another on inclusion. Those are different budgets, different buyers and different conversations.

The transition is slow by design. Ofsted inspects on a cycle, so a school keeps its old single-word grade until it happens to be reinspected, and the majority of English schools have not been. There is no cut-off date on which old grades stop being valid; they simply get replaced one school at a time over several years.

This is why any dataset that shows only one of the two is misleading. A list showing only old grades is increasingly out of date. A list showing only report cards covers a small fraction of schools. TrustlyEd holds both, side by side, with the date of each, so it is always clear which judgement is the live one and how old it is.