Department for Education
Schools & Pupils (School Census)
Every school in England with its postcode, size, type and phase — plus who its pupils are: age, year group, free school meals, first language and ethnicity. Taken from the January census each year.
At a glance
- Publisher
- Department for Education
- Updates
- Updated annually
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-16
PropertyRetailProfessional & B2B servicesConstruction & tradesEducation & schoolsPeople & communities
What your business can use it for
- Site selectionSchools are where the families are. Counting pupils within a radius tells you more about a residential catchment than population totals do — and it tells you their ages.
- Market analysisProfile the households around your sites using pupil characteristics — free school meals as an affluence signal, first language for the communities you serve.
- Sales prospectingIf you sell to schools, this is the addressable market with a postcode and a size attached to every one of them.
Works with data you already have
- Your catchment, territory or site postcodesPostcodesThe school-level file carries school_postcode; link to LSOA/LAD via the free ONS lookup, or match schools within a radius of your sites
How to get it
- Schools, pupils and their characteristics — the releasePortalNo account needed. Published each June from the previous January's census. Be aware: the headline tables here are national, regional and local-authority only.
- School-level data — one row per schoolBulk downloadThis is the cut that carries a school reference number and school postcode per row, with phase, type, size and pupil characteristics. The equivalent for the current year is under Supporting Files on the release's explore page.
What's involved in using it
- The school-level file stacks every year since 2015/16 in one table, one row per school per year, so you pick the year you want before counting — or every school is counted several times over.
- It carries each school's name, reference number and postcode, so placing schools against your sites or territories is straightforward. The pupil numbers — free school meals, English as an additional language, special needs — are in a separate census table you join to it on the reference number.
- Councils appear twice, as the old three-digit education code and the current ONS code, so match on the ONS code when lining it up with other council-level data.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (7)
- England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run separate censuses.
- The obvious downloads are aggregated to local authority or region. The school-level rows with postcodes are in the underlying or supporting files, which is where most people fail to look.
- It is a snapshot from one day each January, published the following June — expect it to be around 18 months behind by the time you use it.
- Pupils are counted where they go to school, not where they live. In areas with selective or faith schools that is a long way apart.
- Free school meals eligibility reflects benefits policy as much as local affluence, and the published figures do not yet reflect the 2026/27 expansion.
- This is the census, not the school register: for the definitive list of open and closed establishments, Get Information About Schools is the DfE's own service — not yet catalogued here.
- In the census table, percentages are text with a % sign, missing values are written NA, three national summary rows (reference NAT) sit at the end, and one column was renamed in the 2023/24 file, so clean the values and line up the columns before stacking years.
Ask us about Schools & Pupils (School Census)
Ask a factual question about Schools & Pupils (School Census) — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.