Methodology
How Ofsted Insights derives its headline measure for each provider, maps pre-2025 outcomes to the renewed Education Inspection Framework, counts local authority figures and refreshes its dataset.
Ofsted Insights publishes derived statistics on top of inspection report cards collected from reports.ofsted.gov.uk. Ofsted is the authoritative source for every provider record; we add navigation, aggregation and search on top. This page explains the choices we make when summarising raw inspection data so anyone (researchers, journalists, AI assistants citing our pages) can audit the figures.
Terminology we use precisely
- Inspection
- A single visit to a provider, which produces one report card.
- Evaluation area
- A graded judgement on one area under the renewed Education Inspection Framework (EIF, effective 10 November 2025). Early years providers are graded on up to six areas: curriculum and teaching; achievement; inclusion; leadership and governance; behaviour, attitudes and routines; and children's welfare and wellbeing. A seventh area, "Early years", applies only to schools with early years provision, so an early years provider inspection produces up to six evaluation-area judgements.
- Graded judgement
- An evaluation-area judgement expressed as one of the five EIF outcomes: exceptional, strong standard, expected standard, needs attention, urgent improvement.
- Area judgement counts
- National grade distributions on Ofsted Insights count area judgements, not providers: one graded inspection contributes one judgement for each area it was graded on.
- Framework
- Either the renewed EIF (2025 onward) or the previous Ofsted framework (Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, Inadequate, in use until early November 2025). Pre-2025 inspections retain their original wording in our data; only headline summaries map them to the unified scale below.
Our headline measure for each provider
The renewed EIF does not give an overall grade. Ofsted publishes a separate judgement for each evaluation area. To give a provider one headline outcome, Ofsted Insights uses the lowest graded area: the provider's headline measure is the lowest of the area grades in its latest inspection. This is an Ofsted Insights measure, not an Ofsted judgement. It is deliberately conservative and is labelled as such wherever we show it.
Where the latest inspection pre-dates the renewed EIF, the published overall grade (Outstanding / Good / Requires Improvement / Inadequate) is used as the headline outcome.
Unified five-point scale and colour mapping
For pages that mix pre-2025 and post-2025 inspections (local authority pages, the UK map, the historical performance view) we collapse both wording sets onto a unified 1 to 5 scale so they can be charted together.
| Rank | EIF (2025+) | Pre-2025 | Colour |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Exceptional | (no equivalent) | Blue |
| 4 | Strong standard | Outstanding | Dark green |
| 3 | Expected standard | Good / Met / Compliant | Green |
| 2 | Needs attention | Requires Improvement | Amber |
| 1 | Urgent improvement | Inadequate / Not Met / Not Compliant | Red |
The Quality Index shown on local authority pages is the arithmetic mean of these 1 to 5 ranks across the local authority's currently graded providers. It is not Ofsted's number; it is a summary statistic we compute.
Local authority figures
- Active providers
- Early years and childcare providers in the local authority whose Ofsted registration is currently active. Closed and resigned registrations are excluded.
- Currently graded
- Active providers whose most recent inspection has a grade on record. Each provider is counted once, in the band of that latest inspection: the lowest graded area for renewed EIF inspections, or the published overall grade for older inspections.
- Other outcomes
- Graded providers whose latest grade does not map to one of the five bands (for example Satisfactory). It equals currently graded minus the five bands, so the bands always add up to the currently graded total.
- MCP get_la_summary
- The Ofsted Insights MCP tool get_la_summary counts every provider whose local authority name contains the search text, including closed registrations, and reports area-grade distributions rather than one band per provider. Its totals are therefore higher than, and not directly comparable with, the active figures on local authority pages.
Local authority figures are recalculated from the live dataset and dated each day.
What "closed" vs "removed from Ofsted" means
A provider is marked closed when its registration has ended (voluntarily resigned, deregistered after enforcement, or amalgamated). A provider is marked removed from Ofsted when Ofsted's public register no longer lists it but no closure reason was published; we keep the historic profile so inspection history remains citable.
Privacy
Childminders and other home-based providers are registered at a home address. Ofsted Insights never publishes their telephone number or full address in page content or structured data; only the town and local authority are shown.
Dataset freshness
We collect from reports.ofsted.gov.uk every day and publish a refresh timestamp on the developers page and inside /llms.txt. Individual provider pages show their own data-refreshed date.
Corrections
If you spot a discrepancy between an Ofsted Insights page and the corresponding Ofsted report, please contact us. The Ofsted report is always authoritative; we will reconcile our derived figure on the next refresh.