Data & method

• Get Information About Schools (DfE) — the statutory register: name, address, type, phase, age range, gender, religious character, capacity, pupils on roll and free school meal share.
• School and college performance tables (DfE) — Key Stage 2 results and progress, GCSE Attainment 8 and Progress 8, A-level grades and points, and where 16-18 leavers go next.
• School census — English as an additional language and special educational needs shares.
• postcodes.io — turns your postcode or town into coordinates. Your location is never stored.

Map coordinates are converted from the Ordnance Survey national grid to standard latitude and longitude using a full Helmert transformation, so pins land on the right building rather than roughly the right street.

One 0–100 number so primaries and secondaries can share a map. For primary schools it is the percentage of pupils reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and maths. For secondaries it rescales Attainment 8 — a 0–90 point measure where roughly 46 is the national average — onto the same scale. Green is strong, amber is around average, red is below. A grey pin means results aren't published for that school, which is normal for new, special and independent schools.

Councils do not publish a single national feed of “last distance offered”, so no honest tool can simply look your answer up. We model it instead:

1. We measure how many pupils all comparable schools nearby take, and over what area — the local pupil density.
2. From the school's own intake and that density we derive the catchment radius it would need to fill its places, capped sensibly by phase (tighter for primaries, wider for secondaries).
3. Your straight-line distance is compared to that radius on a smooth curve: comfortably inside is high, right on the edge is about even, well outside drops away.
4. We then adjust for how full the school is against its published capacity, for sibling priority, and for selective or faith admission criteria.

It is a well-reasoned approximation, not a prediction. Always read the school's own published admission arrangements before you apply, and never use this as your only basis for a decision.

No official school-level dataset records Oxbridge or Russell Group offers, so we don't claim to. For sixth forms we show the published share of leavers continuing to higher education, which is the closest honest equivalent. Ofsted judgements are also not part of the register we use, so they aren't shown.