DfE spend over £25k is not school spend

This is the most common confusion we run into, and it's an expensive one if you build a prospect list on it.

The Department for Education publishes its own transactions over £25,000, the same transparency duty every department has. We import it, because it's genuinely useful for one job. It is not, at any point, a record of what schools buy.

The figures make that obvious once you look. 338,570 payments between January 2025 and April 2026, £144.8bn in total, across 14,502 suppliers, and zero rows carrying a school identifier. The biggest payee is the Student Loans Company at £30.7bn. After that it drops off a cliff into county councils and higher-education bodies: Hampshire £1.6bn, Lancashire £1.5bn, the Office for Students £1.5bn, Kent £1.5bn, Birmingham £1.2bn.

That's a department funding higher education and passing money to local authorities. There is no catering contract for a primary school anywhere in it.

What it's actually good for is selling to the department. If your buyer is the DfE itself, this file is a complete record of who they already pay, how much and how often, and that's a strong position to negotiate from. It's also a reasonable way to see which local authorities carry the largest departmental flows.

For school-level buying you want a different source entirely. School finance returns show where a school's money goes by category. Find a Tender shows what trusts have formally awarded. Neither is this file.

We label it DfE payees on the site rather than school spend for exactly this reason, and we've resisted requests to rename it back to something that sells better.

Method. Counted from the monthly DfE spend over £25,000 CSVs published on GOV.UK, as imported to 30 April 2026. Amounts are the payment values as published, and re-imports are no-ops because the natural key includes the payment reference.