Insights | TrustlyEd

8 September 2026

Half of schools are in a trust. Most trusts have one school.

12,410 of England's 24,553 open schools belong to an academy trust. That doesn't mean half the buying moved upward: 960 of the 2,135 trusts run a single school, while 111 trusts run 3,572 between them.

8 September 2026 · Updated 25 September 2026

That £3.6bn of school contracts is really £412m

Add up the value on every school and trust award notice published since February 2025 and you get £3.6bn. We first wrote that the honest number was £2.4bn. It isn't. Take out framework ceilings and one procurement-services contract and it's £412m.

8 September 2026

Schools tender for catering and cleaning, not software

Of 909 school and trust award notices since the Procurement Act took effect, catering is the largest category at 54 and cleaning second at 39. IT services account for five.

8 September 2026

One school in ten has a report card

2,481 open England schools have been inspected under the new framework. 19,251 still carry an old single-word grade. If your list only shows report cards, it covers a tenth of the market.

8 September 2026

The median school has 234 pupils

The average English school has 366 pupils and the median has 234. Nearly half of all open schools, 10,326 of them, have fewer than 210. If you price per pupil, the mean has been quietly lying to you.

8 September 2026

Most school closures are not closures

495 English schools closed in the past twelve months. 326 of them reopened the next morning under a new number, because academy conversion is recorded as a closure and a fresh opening. Only 68 were closures in the sense you'd assume.

8 September 2026

Teacher retention is the number, not vacancies

Across 21,965 schools in the 2024-25 workforce return, average teacher retention was 83.7 per cent and the average teacher salary was £48,129. The published vacancy rate averages 0.36 per cent, which is the least useful figure in the file.

8 September 2026

Free school meals beats Ofsted grade as a targeting signal

The median English school has 23 per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals. The top tenth sits above 52.6 per cent, and 2,625 schools are over half. If what you sell is funded from pupil premium, that spread matters far more than an inspection grade.

8 September 2026

DfE spend over £25k is not school spend

We hold 338,570 Department for Education payments over £25,000, worth £144.8bn. Not one of them carries a school URN, and the largest single payee is the Student Loans Company at £30.7bn. If someone sells you this as school procurement data, they've sold you the wrong file.

8 September 2026

How often each school dataset actually changes

GIAS changes every day. Ofsted's structured data lands monthly. School finance arrives once a year and is already a year old when it does. Buying a schools database without asking which of those you're getting is how people end up presenting last year's list.

8 September 2026

Why school ICT spend looks like it doubled

The average school's ICT line jumped 2.42 times between 2023-24 and 2024-25. Almost none of that is new spending. The DfE rebuilt the category underneath it, and anyone benchmarking across that boundary is quoting a paperwork change as a buying signal.

31 March 2026 · Updated 1 September 2026

What replaced Ofsted grades, explained

From 10 November 2025, new Ofsted inspections use a six-area report card on a five-point scale, plus safeguarding met or not met. As of 31 March 2026, only 937 inspections had been published under the new framework. Most schools still show an old-framework grade.

31 March 2026 · Updated 1 September 2026

How to read a six-area report card

Six areas: inclusion, curriculum and teaching, achievement, attendance and behaviour, personal development and well-being, leadership and governance. And what exceptional, strong standard, expected standard, needs attention and urgent improvement actually mean.

31 March 2026 · Updated 1 September 2026

GIAS, Ofsted and DfE benchmarking: what each file is for

GIAS is daily and names the establishment. Ofsted structured data is a monthly CSV. DfE Financial Benchmarking is category spend, never named suppliers. Find a Tender is where the supplier names actually are. Here is what each file answers, and what it cannot.

31 March 2026 · Updated 1 September 2026

Old grade, new card: how to tell which one is live

Until a school is reinspected under the new framework, the old-framework grade is still the live grade. TrustlyEd shows them side by side so you do not mistake a historic “Good” for a new report card.