What is Watchsted?

Watchsted - Inspection Intelligence Badge

Watchsted is a free factual tool that shows the most recent inspection grades and reports from Ofsted in a way that’s quick and easy to view.

It’s updated daily, meaning you’ve always got access to the most up-to-date picture of what is happening across Inspections in England.

You can see and filter grades/data via our inspections map – showing you what grades schools are receiving up and down the country at the click of a button.

The data and content presented is all in the public domain.

We’re just making it easier for you to see, saving you valuable time. (We’re nice like that.)

Watchsted was made by Angel Solutions. We make lots of stuff that helps schools – including Perspective Lite.

Inspector Profiles

Example of inspector profile data visualisation

With a subscription to Perspective Lite, you can also take a sneaky look at the inspector coming to visit your schools, with our easy-view Inspector Profiles tool.

You'll be able to see their:

  • Previous inspection details
  • Summaries of their main findings
  • Recommendations for improvement
  • Inspection maps and establishment information

...which should save you some Googling.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Get a quick demo

We created Watchsted to:

  • Provide data for researching schools improvement and inspections
  • Provide transparency and analysis of Ofsted and their providers
  • Aid anyone looking to ensure that government policy regarding school inspections is on track
  • Help local authorities and schools do their very difficult jobs

It’s also why we make Perspective Lite - the free admin tool for school leadership teams.

Sign up for your free Perspective Lite account

About the data

The data and content that we are presenting inside this tool is all in the public domain.

Our data engineers have assembled the relevant data sets and we present them to you in ways that will hopefully provide useful intelligence and save you time.

We’ve made our best efforts to ensure the data we present is accurate, but data is subject to change and may even contain errors at the source. To this end we cannot provide any guarantees with what we are showing, but ask that if you do find any issues with the data then please click here to report it.

Historic Data

We aim to store in our database all full and short school inspections since 1 January 2012. Inspections which took place before this point are not included in any analysis or tables.

Inspection Frameworks

From time to time one inspection framework is replaced and updated by another. There have been a number of such changes in recent years.

Here is a rough timeline of inspection frameworks for schools since 1 January 2012:

  • January 2012 - New Section 5 Framework
  • September 2012 - "Requires Improvement" replaced "Satisfactory"
  • September 2015 - Common Inspection Framework and introduction of Short Inspections
  • September 2019 - Education Inspection Framework

Please note that from September 2024, inspections will no longer contain an overall grade.

We wanted Watchsted to present a different view. In some of our analysis it's possible to limit inspections to those of the latest framework so a like-for-like comparison can be drawn.

We update our inspection statistics every night so that you can benefit from all the latest information.

Analysis & Local Authority Comparison

We are including the school's latest inspection (where available) published since 1 Jan 2012 for Schools (section 5 inspections only).

We have included a date filter allowing you to look at inspections between any 2 dates. You can only select dates AFTER the date we have shown above.

This enables you to look at inspections within the timeframe of a particular framework. You may also want to see the impact of changes in the way behaviour is inspected, or beginning/end of term inspections.

Local Authority Performance Tables

Please note that from 1st September 2024, inspections will no longer contain an overall grade. The data in the Performance Tables comes from inspections before this date.

  • Pupil counts are sourced from GIAS, which itself is typically sourced from the latest spring census. If a pupil count is unavailable we fall back to GIAS’s School Capacity figure.

  • The list of schools as well as each school’s phase and region is sourced from GIAS. Only those marked as "Open" at that date are included. Only School inspections are included in this table.

  • Watchsted is the source of the inspection grades data. Only a school's latest inspection is considered. Where an academy is yet to be inspected its latest pre-conversion inspection grade is used.

  • The latest framework option only shows inspections since 01/09/2015. This allows you to compare like for like inspections. Older frameworks reflect a different grading criteria, but both Ofsted and the DfE include the latest inspection for each school (regardless of the framework) in their calculations for their Good or Outstanding indicator.

  • There is an option to Hide LAs with fewer than 10 primary or 3 secondary school inspections. If an LA is hidden, its values still contribute to regional and national calculations.

Region Sets

Ofsted, Regional School Commissioners and the DfE group local authorities together into regions in similar but different ways.

To find out which Regional School Commissioner and DfE (Government Office) region a school sits within visit the "Location" tab of a school's Get Information about Schools page.

To find out which Ofsted region a school sits within look in the "Details" box on a school's Ofsted provider page.

The Local Authority performance tables show 10 regions some of which can be combined to display either the Ofsted or DfE region sets.

Statistics: Ofsted vs Watchsted

Ofsted's Inspection Data Summary Report provides great statistics on school inspections, but the published data can be a little out of date. We update our inspection statistics every night so that you can benefit from all the latest information.

With this in mind, you may see some differences between our data and that on the Ofsted Summary Report. Any differences are likely to be more noticeable in the local authority comparisons.