How we read the data

Where the figures come from

Key stage 4 and 5 results, school characteristics, absence and destinations come from the Department for Education's annual releases. Inspection outcomes come from Ofsted. Admissions figures come from the DfE's school preferences release. All of it is published under the Open Government Licence and none of it is changed: where a page shows a percentage, that percentage is the published one.

The estate covers state-funded secondary schools in England. Independent schools sit outside the DfE's releases and outside this site, which is why a county's figures here will not match a figure that includes them.

When we call a difference real

This is the one decision everything else rests on. Two schools with different percentages have not necessarily performed differently: a year group is not a sample, but it is one particular set of children, and a different intake at the same school would have produced a different number.

So before calling any gap a difference, we compare it against twice the standard error of the difference between the two shares. A gap narrower than that is reported as in line with average, not as a difference. Presenting it otherwise would be a lie told with real numbers. A gap wider than twice that threshold is reported as well above or well below.

Small entry counts widen the threshold sharply, which is the point. Forty per cent from 22 entries against thirty per cent from 25 is not a finding, and we don't print it as one.

The verdict on a school

The sentence at the top of a report card counts how many of the four headline measures sit above or below the school's own council, using the threshold above. The four are the pass rate in English and maths, the strong pass in both, Attainment 8, and EBacc entry.

Measures that come out in line with average are counted in neither direction. That means a school in line on three measures and below on one is described as below average on one of the four, not on every one. The council is the comparator rather than England, because a parent is usually choosing between schools in one area, and a county that sits below England overall would otherwise make every school in it look poor.

Ranks

Where a report gives a position, 25th of 53 say, it is on Attainment 8 within that council, because that is what the league tables and the guides rank on. We don't show a rank where the council has fewer than six ranked schools: second of three is a fact about a very small pool and reads as more than it is.

A rank on raw attainment is not a measure of how well a school teaches. Progress 8 is the measure that allows for what pupils arrived with, and the DfE has not published it for 2024/25 or 2025/26, so nothing here is adjusted for intake. That is a real limitation and it cuts both ways: a school with a tough intake will rank lower than its teaching deserves, and one with an easy intake higher.

Subject comparisons

A subject is listed as ahead of another school only where the gap clears the same threshold. Where no school is meaningfully ahead the row says level, rather than ordering schools by a difference that is not there.

Entry numbers are shown beside every subject figure because they change what it means. A school entering half its year group for a subject will usually show a lower top-grade share than one entering its top set, and that is a difference in policy rather than in teaching. On a comparison, only subjects at least two of the schools entered are listed: a subject one school offers says nothing about the others.

What we will not say

• We don't rate or score schools. The estate is a report card, not a league table, and there is no Tutorperch ranking of England's schools.
• We don't describe a school in our own words beyond what the figures support. There is no editorial judgement of any named school anywhere on this site.
• We don't publish reviews of schools, or accept them. A school has no way to answer them here and we have no way to verify them.
• We don't claim a school causes its results. Nothing here is adjusted for intake, and until Progress 8 returns nothing here can be.

Corrections

If a page here misreads a figure or says something about a school that the data does not support, we want to know and we'll fix it. Email hello@tutorperch.com with the page and what is wrong with it. Where the underlying DfE or Ofsted figure is the thing in dispute, we reproduce whatever they publish, so a correction to the source data has to go to them.