Methodology and data sources
The short version
TrustlyEd holds no proprietary data. Every figure on the site comes from an official public register, is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and can be checked against the source. What we add is the join, the history and the freshness tracking.
GIAS: the school register
Get Information about Schools is the DfE register of every educational establishment in England. We take the full daily extract and read the establishment name, type, phase, local authority, trust link, pupil numbers, the head teacher name as published, and the generic school contact details. Coordinates are converted from OSGB36 easting and northing to WGS84. GIAS is the spine: the URN it assigns is the key every other dataset joins on.
The universe we count
GIAS lists roughly 52,000 establishments, including some Welsh schools, colleges, universities, nurseries and everything that has ever closed. The product counts, lists and exports a narrower set: open schools in England, identified from the GIAS region and establishment-type group, which comes to around 24,500 and matches the DfE January 2026 school census, plus around 1,500 open maintained and independent schools in Wales from the Welsh Government register. Trusts are narrower still: open academy trusts with at least one open member school, around 2,030 of the 7,000-odd groups GIAS publishes. Individual records outside that universe stay readable, but they are never counted as part of it.
Ofsted: two frameworks side by side
Ofsted publishes management information as a monthly CSV, not as an API. From 10 November 2025 inspections are published as report cards covering six areas on a five-point scale, with safeguarding judged separately as met or not met. Inspections before that date carry a single-word grade. Both are held: the old grade remains the live judgement until a school is reinspected. We also hold the full inspection history back to 2018/19, including ungraded and monitoring visits, which is why a profile can show "confirmed at an ungraded inspection" rather than implying a fresh grade.
School finance
Financial benchmarking comes from the DfE workbooks: Consistent Financial Reporting returns for maintained schools and Academies Accounts Returns for academy trusts. Columns are resolved by header name rather than position, because the DfE moves and renames them between publication years. Where a school converted to an academy mid-year and appears in both returns, the academy return wins.
DfE spend is not school spend
The Department for Education publishes its own transactions over £25,000. This is departmental spend: 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. It is not a record of what any individual school buys, and we label it as DfE spend and DfE payees throughout so it cannot be mistaken for one.
Contract awards
Trust-level procurement is visible through award notices rather than invoices. Find a Tender carries every notice published under the Procurement Act since 24 February 2025, including below-threshold awards. We match the buying organisation to a trust by Companies House number first and normalised name second, and to a school only where the name is unique among open England schools. Ambiguous names are left unmatched rather than guessed. Cancelled and unsuccessful awards are skipped.
Wales
Wales publishes its own school data, so Welsh records don't come from GIAS. The spine is the Welsh Government's address list of schools, which we check weekly and key on its seven-digit school number. A Welsh school GIAS already knows keeps its URN; one it doesn't takes the school number instead. Budgets come from StatsWales: the delegated budget the council sets each April and the outturn published about a year later, from 2019-20 on. Pupil numbers, free school meals, additional learning needs and English as an additional language come from the Pupil Level Annual School Census, also on StatsWales. That census summary counts pupils aged 5 to 15 only, so it runs lower than the register total, and we show both. Estyn inspects Welsh schools, not Ofsted, and has given no overall grade since September 2022. We link to each school's Estyn page and hold none of its content. Most Welsh schools buy through their council, so a Welsh school's page lists the council's school-related award notices from Find a Tender, labelled as the council's. They are kept out of every contract total on the site.
A number most people get wrong
An open framework admits many suppliers under a single award, and every supplier row repeats that award's full value, so summing the rows overstates the total badly. There's a second trap on top: a framework's value is a ceiling over its life, often open to every public body in the country, not money one trust will spend. Across notices published to 1 September 2026 the raw rows sum to about £3.6 billion, one value per award gives about £2.4 billion, and leaving out framework ceilings and one £1.05 billion procurement-services contract leaves £412 million. We count each award once, and leave three kinds of value out of every total: awards on notices flagged as framework agreements, awards worth more than twice the buyer's annual income, and lots whose awards all repeat the same value. Those awards stay listed, with the ceiling marked.
How records are joined
Schools join on URN. Trusts join on GIAS group UID. Contract awards additionally carry their own buyer identity, matched as described above. There is no fuzzy matching between datasets on school names, because school names are not unique.
Licence and attribution
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. If you cite a figure from this site, attribute it to the underlying source and note the refresh cadence: a pupil count is as fresh as yesterday's GIAS extract, but an inspection outcome is as fresh as Ofsted's last monthly file.
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