Most school closures are not closures

If you run a churn report off GIAS status changes without reading the reason code, you'll delete a third of your customer list for no reason. We know because the first version of our own alerting did exactly that.

Over the last twelve months, 529 England schools opened, 495 closed, and 644 joined an academy trust.

The reason codes on those 495 closures: Academy Converter 326, Closure 68, Result of Amalgamation or Merger 42, For Academy 35, Fresh Start 18, De-registered 3. So two thirds are conversions, where the same building, the same staff and very often the same head continue under a new URN the following day.

Add the amalgamations and the picture gets more particular still. Those 42 schools didn't stop existing, they merged, usually two primaries becoming one. The pupils went somewhere. Often the contracts did too.

Genuine closure, the kind where the site goes dark, accounts for 68 schools in a year out of 24,553. It's rare, and it's much rarer than a naive read of the status field suggests.

The number worth acting on is a different one. 644 schools joined a trust in twelve months, and that is a real change in who decides. A school that converted last month has a new set of people above it with their own suppliers and their own frameworks, and that is either the moment you lose the account or the moment you win eleven more.

What we can't see from GIAS is whether the conversion changed anything operationally. Some trusts absorb a new school's contracts immediately and some leave them alone for two years. The status change tells you to make the call, not what the answer will be.

Method. Counted from the daily GIAS extract for England schools, using open and close dates in the twelve months to 8 September 2026 and the reason-closed field as GIAS records it. Trust joins use the recorded date-joined-MAT field, which is populated for most but not all conversions.