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.
Property Retail Professional & B2B services Construction & trades Education & schools People & communities
| Publisher | Department for Education |
|---|---|
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3 what this means |
| Updates | Updated annually |
| Cost | Free — open data |
| Last verified | 2026-07-16 |
What your business can use it for
Site selection
Schools 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 analysis
Profile the households around your sites using pupil characteristics — free school meals as an affluence signal, first language for the communities you serve.
Sales prospecting
If 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
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Your catchment, territory or site postcodes
Postcodes
The 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
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Portal
Schools, pupils and their characteristics — the release
No account needed. Published each June from the previous January's census. Be aware: the headline tables here are national, regional and local-authority only. -
Bulk download
School-level data — one row per school
This 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 register of schools is the spine, and the census, results and trust-membership data are separate files you join to it on the school's reference number — so a full picture is assembled from several files, not read from one.
- The main file includes closed as well as open schools, so you filter to open ones before counting, or the totals are inflated.
- The download link carries today's date and is rebuilt daily, so a saved link goes stale and stops working — the current date has to be built into the request each time.
Worth knowing before you start
- 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.
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.