The median school has 234 pupils

We only went looking because a per-pupil calculation kept producing numbers that didn't match anybody's experience of visiting schools.

Across 24,126 open England schools with a pupil count, the mean is 366 and the median is 234. That's a big gap, and it's the signature of a long tail: 10,326 schools have fewer than 210 pupils, which is the rough size of a one-form-entry primary, and 1,972 have more than a thousand.

England doesn't really have an average school. It has about ten thousand small primaries and about two thousand large secondaries, and the mean sits in the empty space between them.

This matters commercially in a way that's easy to miss. A product priced per pupil is a fundamentally different business at 234 pupils than at 1,000, and a contract value modelled on the mean will overstate your revenue for roughly half your addressable market. A product priced per school has the opposite problem, and looks unaffordable to the smallest ten thousand.

The useful move is to stop using a single number. Segment by size band, price by band, and expect the small-primary band to be most of your list by count and a small share of your revenue.

One honest caveat. Pupil counts come from the January census and sit in GIAS until the next one, so a school that has grown or shrunk mid-year reads as it was in January. For a nursery-through-primary that's a rounding error. For a new free school filling year by year it can be badly out of date.

Method. Counted from the daily GIAS extract, open England schools with a recorded pupil count above zero, which excludes 427 open schools where GIAS carries no number.