Consultation on changes to official statistics on independent schools
We're looking to make some changes to the content of our official statistics on non-association independent school inspections and outcomes in England.
To improve the quality and clarity of this publication, we intend to make the following changes to the data and publication from our next publication in November 2023.
Proposal 1: addition of new ‘school type’ category
We plan to add a new data field called ‘school type’ to each of the existing underlying datasets (D1a, D1b and D2) This will be used to categorise schools in the relevant aggregated data tables (replacing the ‘type of education’ field). ‘School type’ will split schools into the following 3 categories based on their type of education and faith grouping:
- ‘independent special schools’
- ‘independent faith schools’
- ‘other independent schools’ (that are not special and have not declared a faith ethos)
Proposal 2: providing revised underlying data for previous years
We plan to include an extra dataset (D3) containing ‘revised’ in-year data for standard and additional inspections. Revised data is the previous years’ provisional data, plus all inspections from the previous year that were published after the cut-off deadline stated in our methodology. We will provide this data for all inspections from the Education Inspection Framework (EIF), that is, from 1 September 2019, up to a maximum of 5 academic years. We currently only provide this revised data in the following year’s publication at an aggregate level.
Proposal 3: include previous inspection outcomes in the in-year inspection data
We plan to add data fields that include the school’s previous standard inspection outcomes and associated data – such as previous inspection date – to the in-year inspections dataset (D1a). We currently include previous inspection details in our most recent inspections data (D2), but not the in-year data.
Proposed outcomes
These changes will allow:
- the proposed ‘school type’ categorisation for non-association independent schools to provide a better reflection of the schools inspected, and greater clarity to users
- more transparency by providing an additional dataset to include data about inspections that missed the publication cut-off for previous releases and the ability for users to easily replicate analysis from our statistics
Tell us your views
If you would like to comment on these changes, please email the independent schools statistics team by 8 September 2023.