A Quick Start Guide to FavSchools
Learn how to use FavSchools to find, compare and shortlist schools for your children. From the interactive map to detailed school pages.
FavSchools is a free, parent-first map of every UK school. This quick start guide walks through the four things you can do today: find schools, compare them, build a shortlist, and read a full school profile. It takes about five minutes end to end.
1. Start on the map
The map is the heart of FavSchools. Every dot is a real school, colour-coded by Ofsted rating so you can see at a glance how an area is performing. Zoom in to your postcode, filter by primary or secondary, and click any dot to peek at the school.
Try it on FavSchools
Open the interactive map
Pan, zoom and filter to find schools near you.
If you already have a few schools in mind, use the search box at the top of the map to fly straight to one of them. We support school name, postcode and local authority searches.
2. Compare schools side by side
Once you have a few candidates, the Compare page lines them up against the metrics that matter to most parents: Ofsted rating, KS2 SATs (for primaries), Progress 8, Attainment 8, intake size, and historical trends.
You can compare up to four schools at a time. Anyone can see the public summary; sign in to unlock multi-year trend lines and export the comparison as a PDF.
Try it on FavSchools
Compare schools side by side
Up to four schools, on every metric we track.
3. Build your shortlist
When a school feels like a fit, hit the Save button on its page. It joins your Shortlist, which is just a private list of schools you’re considering. The shortlist syncs across the map, the compare page and your dashboard, so you only have to save a school once.
A shortlist is also the easiest way to pre-fill the Compare page: open Compare and we’ll pull in your saved schools automatically.
4. Read a full school profile
The school profile is the deepest view we offer. For every school we surface:
- Address, contact details and a Mapbox street view
- Latest Ofsted report card and inspection history
- Exam results: KS2 SATs (primaries), GCSE Attainment 8 / Progress 8 / EBacc (secondaries), and A-Level points (sixth forms)
- Pupil makeup, attendance and persistent absence data
- Where data permits, recent admissions distance trends so you can see how far the school typically draws its pupils
Take Wilson’s School in Sutton as an example: a state grammar with selective entry, consistently among the top-performing secondaries in England. The card below pulls live data from our database.
Real example
Wilson's School
Wallington, Sutton
A grammar school with consistently positive Progress 8 - pupils make significantly more progress than the national average.
Progress 8 (2023/24)
1.27
If you click through, you’ll land on the full profile, which links back out to a Compare and Shortlist button so you can act on what you read.
How our data fits together
We pull from the Department for Education’s open datasets, Ofsted inspection reports, GIAS (the school directory) and local authority admissions PDFs. Every figure carries the year it’s from, and where multiple records exist for one school we always show the most recent published result.
We refresh exam results and Ofsted ratings within days of new releases, and admissions distance data is updated as each local authority publishes its annual report.
Where to next
Reading our other guides will help you make the most of the data. Three good starting points:
- Catchment areas - what they are, how they’re drawn, and how to use them.
- Ofsted inspections - what the four ratings mean and how the new 2025 report cards work.
- The grammar school path - a complete walk-through of the 11+ exam, application timeline and preparation routes.
You’re ready. Open the map and start exploring.
Try it on FavSchools