School rankings

About Ofsted ratings

Ofsted inspects all state-funded schools in England. Up to 10 November 2025 it gave each school one overall grade, Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement or Inadequate, judged on quality of education, behaviour, personal development and leadership. Those are the grades ranked here. Inspections carried out from 10 November 2025 work differently: Ofsted issues a report card, gives no overall effectiveness grade at all, and grades several evaluation areas on a five-point scale of Exceptional, Strong standard, Expected standard, Needs attention and Urgent improvement, with safeguarding recorded as met or not met. A school inspected since that date will not carry a single word on this page, so treat every rating below as the grade from its last inspection under the old framework and check the date on the Ofsted report itself.

How Ofsted school ratings work now

Since 10 November 2025 there is no single Ofsted rating to look up. Ofsted's own framework is explicit: "From November 2025, we no longer provide an overall effectiveness grade for any provider inspected under the framework." What a school gets instead is a report card, with a separate grade and a short written explanation for each evaluation area, so a school can be strong on one thing and weak on another without either being averaged away.

For state-funded schools the graded evaluation areas are:

• Inclusion, its own area for the first time
• Curriculum and teaching
• Achievement
• Attendance and behaviour
• Personal development and wellbeing
• Leadership and governance
• Early years, where the school has it
• Post-16 provision, where the school has it

Each of those is graded on a five-point scale, from best to worst: Exceptional, Strong standard, Expected standard, Needs attention, Urgent improvement. Safeguarding is handled separately and is not on that scale at all: it is recorded simply as met or not met, and it sits at the top of the report card so parents can find it first.

The practical consequence for anyone comparing schools is that the old shorthand no longer exists. You cannot rank two recently inspected schools against each other with one word, because Ofsted has deliberately stopped producing that word. Read the grid, then read the narrative under it.

What the one-word ratings on this page actually mean

Every grade ranked above comes from an inspection under the previous framework, which ran to 10 November 2025. Under it Ofsted gave one overall effectiveness grade of Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement or Inadequate, formed from judgements on quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, and leadership and management.

Two things follow, and both matter more than they sound.

• Every rating here has an age. A grade is a snapshot of the week the inspectors were in the building, not a running score. A school graded Outstanding in 2018 has had seven years of staff turnover since, and no inspection has tested that grade in the meantime. Always check the inspection date on the Ofsted report itself before you weigh a rating.
• The grades will not be refreshed. Because no school inspected after 10 November 2025 receives an overall grade, the pool of one-word ratings can only shrink from here as old grades age. It will never be topped up. Treat this page as an archive of the last framework rather than a live league table.

Why thousands of schools show no rating

At the time of writing this page lists 4,518 schools as not yet rated, against 1,717 Outstanding, 11,376 Good and 991 Requires Improvement. A blank is not a bad sign and it is usually not a gap in the data. It generally means one of three things: the school is new, or has recently converted to academy status and legally counts as a new school with a clean slate, or it has been inspected since 10 November 2025 and therefore has a report card with no overall grade to show. In every one of those cases the useful document is the Ofsted report itself, not the absence of a word here.

What changed in September 2026

Ofsted now updates its inspection materials once a year, published in advance and taking effect each September, which is a change in itself: the framework used to move unpredictably. The September 2026 update kept the grades and the evaluation areas as they were, and changed how achievement is judged and reported:

• A statistical model that groups similar schools together, so a school's achievement is set against comparable schools rather than a flat national line, with more weight on the attainment and progress of disadvantaged pupils.
• More data published alongside the report card so the context is visible to parents, with national comparisons removed from special school report cards where they were misleading.
• An early years change, comparing the share of children reaching a good level of development with the national average.
• A broader definition of "leaders who have an inclusion role", extending beyond SENCos to designated teachers and others responsible for pupils facing barriers to learning.
• Learning walks narrowed to the curriculum, teaching and achievement areas, with reflection meetings added so leaders hear findings as inspectors form them.

Ofsted school ratings: common questions

Does Ofsted still give schools an overall rating?
No. From 10 November 2025 Ofsted stopped issuing an overall effectiveness grade for any provider inspected under the current framework. Schools receive a report card grading each evaluation area separately instead.

What are the new Ofsted grades?
Exceptional, Strong standard, Expected standard, Needs attention and Urgent improvement, applied to each evaluation area. Safeguarding is not graded on that scale: it is recorded as met or not met and appears at the top of the report card.

Is an Outstanding rating still worth anything?
It tells you what inspectors found on the date of that inspection, and nothing about the school since. Because no new one-word grades are being issued, every Outstanding you see is from 10 November 2025 or earlier, and many are far older. Check the date first.

Where do I read a school's report card?
On Ofsted's own reports site, which carries both the current report cards and the archived reports under the old framework, so you can see how a school was judged before as well as now.

How to check any school's Ofsted rating in 2026

Because the one-word grade has gone, looking a school up now takes three steps rather than one, and each answers a different question.

1. Find the school on Ofsted's reports site. It carries both the current report cards and every archived report under the old framework, so you can see what a school was graded before as well as how it is judged now.
2. Read the inspection date before the grade. This is the step most people skip. Any one-word rating you see today comes from an inspection on or before 10 November 2025, and plenty are five or ten years older than that. A grade describes the week the inspectors were in the building, not the school your child would join in September.
3. On a report card, read safeguarding first, then the area you care about. Safeguarding sits at the top and is not on the five-point scale: it is recorded as met or not met. After that, a school can be Strong standard on curriculum and Needs attention on attendance, and the point of the report card is that neither cancels out the other.

One thing Ofsted does not tell you is how a school performs on results. That is a separate government service, the Department for Education's compare school and college performance site, which publishes attainment, progress and destination data by school. Inspection judgements and performance data answer different questions, and a school can look different on each.

If the school you are checking shows no rating at all here, that is not a warning sign. It usually means the school is new, has recently converted to academy status and legally counts as a new school, or has been inspected since 10 November 2025 and therefore has a report card with no overall grade to publish.

Framework detail, evaluation areas, grade names and the withdrawal of the overall effectiveness grade taken from Ofsted's education inspection framework for use from November 2025, and the September 2026 changes from Ofsted's own briefing on the September 2026 updates. Checked 27 August 2026.