Most people check schools the same way: type the postcode into a map, see which ones are close, read the Ofsted word, and move on. Every step of that is reasonable and the result is still usually wrong.
The nearest school is not your school
Admissions are decided by the council's published criteria, not by which building you can see from the window. Distance is one criterion, and it sits below looked-after children, children with an education, health and care plan naming the school, and siblings already on roll. In a popular school those categories can fill most of the intake before distance is reached at all.
The number that actually tells you something is the furthest distance offered last year. Most councils publish it for every school, every year, and it is the closest thing to an honest answer about your chances. A school four hundred metres away that offered no further than two hundred metres last September is not your school.
Read the date before you read the grade
An Ofsted grade is a judgement about a school on two or three particular days, written by a team who were there once. That is still worth knowing. It is not worth treating as a current description of a school inspected several years ago, under a head who has since left.
Read the report rather than the headline word. The sections on behaviour and on the quality of education usually tell you more about what the days are like than the overall judgement does, and a school graded good with a sharp comment about attendance is giving you more information than a one-word summary ever could.
Secondary decides more than primary
Primary feels urgent because it is nearer. Secondary shapes the decision more, because the alternative to a secondary you did not want is moving house at eleven, and that is an expensive way to fix a research problem.
If there is any chance you will still be in the house in eight years, look at the secondary intake now. Find out which primaries feed it, whether the council operates a named feeder system, and what the furthest offered distance has been.
What our tool does, and does not do
Our schools tool lists every school within three miles of a postcode from the Department for Education register, with its phase, size, and its latest Ofsted outcome and the date of that inspection. Across the postcodes we hold it covers 27,863 schools.
What it cannot do is tell you whether you would get a place. Nobody can, because admissions are decided after applications close. Treat the list as the set of schools worth looking into, then go to the council's admissions pages for the criteria and the distances.
The two minutes that beat an afternoon of reading
Ring the school office and ask two things: whether they have had places come free in your child's year group recently, and what the admissions picture looked like last year. School offices answer this question constantly and are usually straightforward about it.
Then, if you can, go at the start or end of a day and stand outside. You will learn something about the walk, the traffic and the mood of the place that no dataset holds.
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