Choosing a school is one of the biggest decisions a family makes, and it is wrapped in questions that are hard to answer from a single school's website. How good is a typical school, really? How many are religious? Is a single-sex education even an option any more? We hold records for more than 30,000 schools and colleges, so instead of guessing, we counted.
The Dataset
Our database holds just over 30,000 schools and colleges, covering everything from village primaries to large sixth-form colleges. For each one we record its phase, its inspection rating, whether it has a religious character, whether it is single-sex, and its capacity. Inspection ratings come from Ofsted, the inspectorate for England, so the rating figures below describe schools that have been through an Ofsted inspection. Primary schools make up the bulk of the list, as you would expect, outnumbering secondaries by roughly five to one.
The Ofsted Report Card
Of the schools with a current Ofsted grade, the overall picture is reassuringly solid. The vast majority are rated Good, a smaller elite are Outstanding, and genuinely failing schools are rare.
| Rating | Schools |
|---|---|
| Good | 14,175 |
| Outstanding | 2,244 |
| Requires Improvement | 1,114 |
| Inadequate | 107 |
Put together, more than nine in ten inspected schools are rated Good or Outstanding. Roughly one in eight carries the top Outstanding grade, while fewer than one school in a hundred is rated Inadequate. Whatever the headlines say, the typical British school is a Good one, and an Outstanding school is a real distinction held by a clear minority.
A Quarter Are Faith Schools
Faith schools are a bigger part of the system than many people realise. More than 7,000 schools in our records have a religious character, which is around a quarter of those whose status is recorded. Two denominations dominate completely.
Faith schools by denomination
- Church of England about 4,670 schools
- Roman Catholic about 1,957 schools
- All other faiths combined a few hundred, including Jewish, Muslim and Methodist schools
The Church of England runs more schools than every other faith put together, a legacy of the days when the church, not the state, was the main provider of education in this country. Roman Catholic schools form the next largest group. Everything else, from Jewish to Muslim to Methodist, makes up only a small share of the total.
Single-Sex Schools Are Nearly Gone
If you want a single-sex education for your child, the odds are increasingly against you. Out of more than 25,000 schools whose intake is recorded, only about 800 are single-sex.
Single-sex schools
- Girls' schools 435
- Boys' schools 377
- Mixed schools the other 24,800 or so
That is roughly three schools in every hundred. The single-sex school, once a fixture of British education, is now very much the exception, and there are slightly more girls' schools left than boys'. For most families, a mixed school is not a choice so much as simply what is available.
The Biggest Schools
British schools are getting larger, and the biggest are enormous. Among secondary schools, several now have space for close to three thousand pupils.
| School | Town | Capacity |
|---|---|---|
| Ashfield Comprehensive School | Nottingham | 3,146 |
| Loxford School | Ilford | 3,000 |
| Walton High | Milton Keynes | 3,000 |
| Beal High School | Ilford | 2,840 |
A school of three thousand pupils is a small town in its own right. Several of the largest are in outer London, where population growth has pushed schools to expand far beyond the few hundred pupils that older generations would recognise. Add in further education colleges and the numbers climb higher still.
What the Numbers Show
Step back and a clear portrait of British schooling appears. It is overwhelmingly mixed, mostly secular but with a deep Church of England and Catholic seam running through it, rated Good far more often than not, and increasingly built at scale. The reassuring headline is that a failing school is genuinely rare. The harder truth is that the labels parents often look for, Outstanding or single-sex, describe only a small slice of what is actually out there.
To see which schools sit near a particular postcode, try our school catchment finder, or browse the schools listed on any town page across the directory.