How often each school dataset actually changes
By David Cooper · 8 September 2026
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.
Freshness is the only thing that separates a school database from a spreadsheet somebody downloaded once. So here's ours, source by source, including the bit that's currently behind.
GIAS publishes a full extract every day and we import it every morning at 03:10. Names, addresses, heads, status, trust membership and pupil counts all come from here. When a school converts or a head changes, this is where it shows up first, usually within a day or two of the event.
Ofsted doesn't offer a live feed. It publishes management information as a monthly CSV, so an inspection carried out in the first week of a month may not appear in structured form until the next one. We import weekly to catch the drop, but the ceiling is Ofsted's, not ours. Report PDFs we fetch nightly, a school at a time, and there are currently 122,566 documents across 23,986 schools.
School finance is the slow one. Consistent Financial Reporting and Academies Accounts Return workbooks come out annually, and the most recent full year we hold is 2024-25 across 22,080 schools. That's the newest that exists, not the newest we've bothered to fetch, and anyone offering you fresher school-level finance is either modelling it or making it up.
DfE spend over £25,000 is monthly, and ours currently runs to 30 April 2026. That's a publishing lag at the department's end rather than a gap in our import, and it's the one number on this page we'd like to be better.
Find a Tender is continuous, notices appearing within days of an award, and we import weekly. Latest notice on file was published on 1 September 2026.
The reason we publish this at all is that it's the question nobody asks during a demo and everybody regrets not asking three months later. Ask any vendor for a last-updated date per dataset, not for the site. If they can only give you one date for everything, they have one date for everything, and it's the day they bought the file.
We run a freshness check every morning at eight and it emails us when a source goes past its expected interval, which is how we'd find out before a customer did. It's the least glamorous thing we've built and probably the most important.
Method. Cadences are the publishing schedules of the underlying sources, and the import times are our own cron schedule. Record counts are as at 8 September 2026.