A free tool · the new Ofsted report card
The single overall grade is gone. Here is how to read a school now.
From September 2024 Ofsted stopped giving state schools one word to sum them up. In its place is a report card that judges each area on its own, on a new five-point scale. This tool teaches that scale, lets you weight the areas your family cares about, and ranks every school inspected under the new framework so far by your own priorities.
Step one · learn the scale
What the five bands actually mean, in plain English.
Ofsted grades each evaluation area on this five-point scale instead of handing out one overall word. Read from the bottom up: Expected standard is the line every school is meant to reach, the two bands above it mark real strength, and the two below it mark concern.
How the schools inspected so far are spread across the scale
Pick an evaluation area to see where the 1,323 report-carded schools sit. Every figure below is counted from the data, not estimated.
Step two · the areas we can show
Three parts of the report card, judged separately.
The report card grades several areas of school life on their own, so a school can be strong in one and struggling in another without either being averaged away. This tool uses the three areas held in the data: Behaviour and attitudes, Personal development and wellbeing, and Leadership and governance, alongside the school's old overall grade for context.
Behaviour and attitudes covers whether the classroom is calm and orderly and pupils feel safe. Personal development and wellbeing covers character, confidence and preparing pupils for life beyond exams. Leadership and governance covers how well the school is run and held to account. Because they are judged separately, the school that suits your child depends on which of these you weigh most, so that is what you set next.
An honest limit. Report cards are still rolling out. These 1,323 schools are the ones re-inspected under the new framework so far, out of roughly 26,000 state schools in England, so about one in twenty.
If a school you want is not in the tool, that does not count against it. It simply has not had a new-framework inspection yet, and still carries its older grade elsewhere.
Step three · rank by what matters to you
Set your priorities, then read the schools your way.
Move the sliders to weight each area, then search or filter. Every school is scored as the weighted average of its three area judgements (each band counts 1 for Urgent improvement up to 5 for Exceptional) and the table re-ranks live. Set an area to zero to ignore it.
Your priorities
Higher weight means that area counts for more in the score.
Find schools
Narrow to the ones you can actually apply to.
How to read this: each coloured cell is the school's judgement for that area (the word is shown, not colour alone). The score on the right is your weighted average from 1.00 to 5.00. The old grade is the school's previous single overall grade, kept only for context; Ofsted no longer issues it.
| # | School | Old grade | Behaviour | Personal dev. | Leadership | Your score ▼ |
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Then look up your own street
This tool ranks the ones inspected. The report finds the ones near you.
The tool above covers the schools re-inspected under the new framework across England. To see every state school around a specific postcode, ranked by distance with its latest rating and inspection date, get the report for your address.