After four years of teaching Maths in London, I know the importance – and stress – of an Ofsted inspection.
But for parents, arguably, the pressure is even greater – how do you pick the right school for your child? Can you trust the Ofsted data to guide you?
Ofsted – The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills – is the UK government body that inspects all state-funded English schools.
According to Government statistics, there are 24,479 schools in England and during the 2023/24 academic year, Ofsted carried out 6,930 inspections to ensure that minimum standards are met.
It’s understandable then, that navigating where to send your child is a maze.
Ofsted’s data is publicly accessible but the trouble for parents is trying to understand both the language and the technical data.
As a result, according to the National Centre for Social Research, only 44% of the public trusted Ofsted in 2024.
If I was a parent hoping Ofsted reports might guide my important school decision, I would not know where to begin. Nevertheless, Ofsted provides a nationally recognised and unique educational dataset and there is simply no option but to use it.
Louise Murphy, a 30-year-old mother of two, said: “Ofsted definitely influenced the school I chose. I looked at a few different schools, and then I’d check the Ofsted report to decide whether it was even worth going to view them.
“There was one near my mum’s that was an option, but it was rated “Requires Improvement”, so I didn’t go and see it.”
Ultimately, Murphy considered three schools for her daughter using Ofsted as a lens to filter out certain options.
She added: “I actually knew people who said it was a good school, but because of the Ofsted rating, I didn’t end up considering it.”
This certainly seems to answer the question posed by the Association of School and College Leaders: “Ofsted, we’re told, exists to tell parents how good schools are. Do parents change their minds about what makes a ‘good’ school as often as Ofsted do?”
The answer according to Murphy is a clear cut yes.
Conversely, the Good Schools Guide research found that parents are now using social media and AI more for school information than reading Ofsted reports.
Indeed, only one in five Gen Z parents used Ofsted for their schooling decision.
The research found: “A TikTok tour of a new sports hall or a candid post on a parents’ Facebook group or online forum post can feel far more immediate and relatable than a 20-page Ofsted document.”
You can sympathise. Even an old teaching colleague of mine, fully up-to-speed with the technical language, said they had used ChatGPT to break down the Ofsted data as they found the website so unclear – which seems absurd.
It prompts the question: why is Ofsted data so complicated? If you Google Ofsted, you can easily look at a school’s inspection results – but what if you do not have a school in mind? Gaining an overview or being guided by a location remains difficult.
Eventually, I found a government spreadsheet with all the inspections of the five years up to December 2024. It should be noted that a new Ofsted framework came into practice in November 2025, but all data here is ‘as of the date 31/8/24’.
Even with a background teaching maths and working with spreadsheets, navigating this data took me some time. But this is what I found out: London is an outlier.
Looking briefly at the almost 22,000 schools nationwide given an Overall Effectiveness (OE) rating from 1-4 (‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ and ‘inadequate’), I found that Hampshire was statistically the worst local authority with 12 schools rated ‘inadequate’.
But a move to Hertfordshire puts you in a good position to place your child in one of their 102 ‘outstanding’ schools. Not to be muddled with Herefordshire with merely 19.
Steve Jones, the Executive Head of a Multi Academy Trust in Hampshire, and a parent himself, said: “I do find Ofsted reports useful for comparison but I’m also acutely aware of their limitations.”
He compared choosing a school to buying a house as data does not give a complete picture on what learning or living somewhere would be like.
Jones said: “You can read all the reports you like, but a fixed-point judgement taken under particular conditions (time of year, weather, staff absence, leadership stress levels) doesn’t necessarily give you a reliable read on what the school is like to be part of day to day.”
Another school head agreed that Ofsted data can be useful.
They added: “Parents tend to use Ofsted reports most when choosing a school but rely on them less for day to day understanding of school quality.”
So parents do use Ofsted – but wearily. And, whilst it does influence their decision, the data is complicated, especially in London.
Looking at the 2565 schools in the London region, it was clear that London data behaves differently to the rest of the nation.
Amongst OE ratings, ‘good’ was dominant, with more than 70% of schools in this category.
London’s data is better then than nationally with just over 1.5% of all listed schools ‘inadequate’ but less than 0.5% of London’s rated the same.
Newham came out top of London’s local authorities with 37 schools rated ‘outstanding’.
Meanwhile, only nine councils had a school with inadequate ratings.
Croydon had 10 rated ‘requires improvement’, and one rated ‘inadequate’ making it the ‘worst’ London council statistically.
A Croydon Council spokesperson said: “89.8% of Croydon’s primary, secondary and special schools inspected were judged to be good or better by Ofsted, up until August 2024. This is just below the national average of 90.3% and the Outer London average of 95.8%.”
They were keen – and correct – to point out that the one-word OE judgement has now been dropped – not that this makes past data mute nor explains Croydon’s data in August 2024.
Parents are guided by location, finances, access and – apparently – Ofsted data.
In addition, it would seem likely that deprivation data would be relevant as part of a parent’s consideration – and presumably likely to echo Ofsted effectiveness data.
It will perhaps come as a surprise then that deprivation nationwide seems to affect school effectiveness differently than it does in London, as can be seen in the graphs below:
Nationwide, a similar number of schools were rated in category 2 whether in deprived areas or not. Meantime, in London, the numbers in category 2 fall in line with decreases in deprivation.
The maps show London data disrupts national patterns as the areas with the most deprived schools are not the ones with the most ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’ schools.
Nationally, whilst more than 17% of ‘Least Deprived’ schools were ‘outstanding’, less than 13% of ‘Most Deprived’ were the same.
In London however, 30% of ‘Least deprived’ schools were ‘outstanding’ and 24% of ‘Most deprived’ were too. Thus, the data shows London schools do significantly better overall, irrespective of deprivation.
In terms of the data for Croydon and Newham, Croydon had more schools that were less deprived than Newham did.
Newham had ten schools rated ‘most deprived’ versus Croydon’s nine; this is proportional too: 9.9% of Newham’s schools were ‘most deprived’ vs 7.2% of Croydon’s, as shown in the graph:
However, only 3% of Newham’s schools were inadequate but 8% of Croydon’s were.
School comparisons based on Ofsted data may, therefore, be misleading: schools in disadvantaged areas may face higher poverty levels, attendance difficulties, staffing shortages and greater SEND demand, but this does not seem to impact London data.
What are parents to do with this data especially when also impacted by cost-of-living concerns? Particularly when neither Ofsted data nor deprivation statistics seem to tell parents if a child will thrive at a school. It is a snapshot, not a lived experience.
Even using just London as the filter for the dataset still left a vast area for any parent to analyse. So, I evaluated those schools with an SW postcode: 228 schools in 9 councils with 30.7% rated 1, 65.4% rated 2, 3.95% rated 3, and zero rated 4, as shown:
And yet, national data tells us disadvantaged children do worse in their GCSEs: “26% of disadvantaged pupils and 53% of all other pupils got a grade 5 or above” in 2023-24.
According to Ofsted, deprivation data “is based on the mean of the deprivation indices associated with the pupils’ home postcodes, rather than the location of the school itself”.
This shows that deprivation and the disadvantage of a child are linked – hence why, nationally, deprivation appears to be strongly correlated with lower Ofsted ratings: 2.46% of ‘most deprived’ schools were rated inadequate whilst less than 1% of ‘least deprived’ were.
The point for parents here is “beware the data”: depending on the location (with London as a clear outlier), there is a disparity between schools in deprived areas getting ‘good’, indeed ‘outstanding’, Ofsted ratings and children considered disadvantaged (qualifying for free school meals) still getting worse results – something parents need to weigh up.
In London, 0.33% of the ‘most deprived’ schools were rated ‘inadequate’ and in South West London, there were no inadequate schools in 2024 according to Ofsted.
For parents, Ofsted clearly still matters and parents do use it for guidance.
A rating or report card clearly doesn’t explain the complex day-to-day reality of a school but what it can do is identify if a school meets basic important standards including safeguarding, leadership, SEND support, attendance and behaviour.
There are patterns nationally – and anomalies – so, whilst Ofsted data can indicate a school’s performance on the national stage, the results are difficult to follow and – critically – inconsistent.
If a purpose of Ofsted is to help simplify parental decisions around choosing a school, the data suggests that the reality is far more complicated.
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