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 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 24,000 and matches the DfE January 2026 school census. 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.
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. Summing the rows therefore overstates the total badly: the raw figure across our contract data is about £3.6 billion, while the correct total, deduplicated to one value per award, is about £2.4 billion. Any analysis of procurement notices that does not deduplicate per award is inflated by roughly half.
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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