Official Statistics

Local Authority School Places Scorecards guidance

Published 27 June 2019

Applies to England

The Department for Education publishes school places scorecards to enable everyone to see:

• the challenges local authorities face in making good school places available
• funding given to local authorities
• local authorities’ progress in providing school places

1. How to use the school places scorecards

You can look at the school place situation for England or any individual local authority using the school places scorecards. To do this, use the drop-down option at the top of the scorecard to select the national option or your chosen local authority. The list is arranged with England at the top and local authorities in alphabetical order. You can look at primary or secondary places by using the adjacent drop-down option.

When a different local authority is selected, or the education phase is changed, the figures and charts in the scorecard will automatically update to reflect the chosen local authority and phase. This means that you can compare the position in selected local authorities.

2. Quantity

You can see how much progress the chosen local authority is making in providing sufficient school places by looking at the quantity measure.

The dark green portion of the bar chart shows the places already added since academic year 2009/10, the light green portion shows the places planned up to 2020/21 and the final blue portion shows the estimated number of places needed in 2020/21 which are still to find (the number for this portion is shown in the box above the bar chart). Local authorities with relatively small blue bars are making the best progress.

It is important to take care when making comparisons using the quantity measure. Some local authorities have long-standing place pressure, whereas for others it has emerged more recently. Those experiencing long-standing place pressures will have had more chance to demonstrate that they can add large quantities of places.

The estimated percentage of spare places is also shown in the box above the bar chart. It is common for a local authority to have both a need for additional places and spare capacity, reflecting pockets of localised need for places or pockets of localised spare places.

Estimating place pressure in future years relies upon the forecasts of pupil numbers made by local authorities. We have included two graphics, which illustrate the forecasting accuracy of the selected local authority for forecasts made one and three years ago. The blue arc swings from left to right to show under forecasts and over forecasts respectively. The bar extends to the position of the local authorities’ forecast in the range of all local authorities forecasts.

3. Preference

You can use the scorecard to see how well the chosen local authority is able to meet parents’ school preferences. The scorecard shows the percentage of applicants who received an offer of a place in one of their top three preferences for entry in September 2018, in the local authority. This is presented alongside the same percentage for England.

The chart breaks down the percentage of applicants who received an offer of one of their top three preferences to those who received an offer of their first, second or third preferences. The blank section represents the proportion of pupils made an offer of a lower preference (where an LA allows four or more preferences) and the proportion not made a preferred offer. The latter can include applicants who were made an alternative offer and those who were not, on national offer day, made any offer.

4. Quality

You can check the quality measure to see where the chosen local authority has added school places. When the Ofsted rating view is selected the quality measure bar chart shows the number of new places added in the local authority according to the Ofsted rating of the school in which they have been added. There are 4 possible Ofsted ratings: outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate. The typical position is for around 86% of primary places and 83% of secondary places to be added in good or outstanding schools.

It is important to take care when making comparisons using the quality measure as:

• the starting position for local authorities is different and some have more good or outstanding schools to add places to - which is why we also provide the overall distribution of school places by Ofsted rating in the local authority chosen, and for England
• when deciding upon which schools to expand, some good or outstanding schools may be on sites that are not suitable for expansion
• we have used the most recent Ofsted rating available at 31 August 2018 and places may have been added before or after that rating was given
• where schools have amalgamated we have only used an Ofsted rating when we can be sure the rating is for the post-amalgamation school

For secondary you can also change the view to look at the number of new places added according to key stage 4 Progress 8 performance. There are 5 possible Progress 8 bandings: well above average, above average, average, below average and well below average. The typical position is for around 41% of new secondary places to be added in well above average or above average schools.

For the first time, for primary you can also change the view to look at the number of new places added according to either key stage 2 reading or key stage 2 maths progress. There are 5 possible progress bandings as for Progress 8. The typical position is for around 27% of new primary places to be added in schools well above average or above average in maths progress, and 20% of new primary places to be added in schools well above average or above average in reading progress.

5. Cost

You can use the scorecard to see whether the average amount spent on each school place is relatively high or low compared with other local authorities.

The types of projects local authorities reported in 2015/16, 2016/17 and 2017/18 have been split into permanent expansions, temporary expansions and new schools. They have been separated so that you can compare more similar groups of projects between local authorities.

Cost figures have been adjusted to take location factors and inflation into account when average cost per place is calculated. There is further guidance on converting costs into current or future prices and/or regional prices in the scorecard ‘Technical Notes’.

It is important to take care when making comparisons. Some local authorities have small numbers of projects to add places, so cost comparisons become very dependent upon the nature of individual projects. Some additional but limited benchmark information for similar capital programme schemes carried out by the DfE is available in the National School Delivery Cost Benchmarking study (PDF, 7.8MB).

6. More detailed information

If you wish to find out more detail on how the figures are constructed, please go to the ‘Information’ and ‘Technical Notes’ sheets of the scorecard document.