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Get Information About Schools: what the official register holds

Get Information About Schools, usually shortened to GIAS, is the Department for Education's register of educational establishments in England. It lives at get-information-schools.service.gov.uk, holds records for around 65,000 establishments, from academies and council-maintained schools to independent schools and children's centres, and replaced the older EduBase system in 2017. Every school in England is identified by the six-digit unique reference number (URN) it carries on GIAS.

What you can look up on GIAS

• Establishments: name, address, type (community school, academy converter, free school and so on), phase, age range, gender intake, religious character, capacity, pupil numbers, head teacher and local authority. Closed and proposed schools are kept as well as open ones.
• Establishment groups: multi-academy trusts, single-academy trusts, federations and academy sponsors, with a history of which schools have joined or left each trust.
• Governance: governors, trustees and members for council-maintained schools and academy trusts.
• Downloads: CSV files of the public fields, updated daily. The file of all establishments is around 62MB.

Registered users at schools, academy trusts and local authorities sign in with a DfE Sign-in account to update their own records.

What GIAS will not tell you

GIAS is an administrative register, not a guide to how good a school is. Exam results and Progress 8 scores are on the government's Compare school and college performance service, inspection reports are on Ofsted's reports site, and you do not apply for a place through it: school applications go through your local council.

How Schools Insight uses GIAS data

Our school search is built from the GIAS establishment data, cut down to the 18,640 open state-funded mainstream schools that parents search for most: 15,486 primary schools, 2,716 secondaries, 234 sixth-form and 16 to 19 providers, 124 all-through schools and 80 middle schools, across 153 local authorities. About 9,570 are academies or free schools and about 8,880 are council-maintained community, voluntary aided, voluntary controlled or foundation schools.

Enter a postcode and we list the nearest schools by distance. Each school page shows its type, phase, gender intake, pupil numbers (recorded for 17,983 schools), religious character, local authority and URN, with direct links to its GIAS record and its Ofsted report. Independent schools, special schools, pupil referral units and nurseries are not in our search.

Two things worth knowing. Our copy is a periodic snapshot while GIAS updates daily, so check the GIAS record for anything that changes often, such as the head teacher or a planned academy conversion. And the Ofsted grades we show, held for 14,122 schools, are the last single-word judgements from inspections up to September 2024. Ofsted stopped giving single-word overall grades that month and has published report cards since November 2025, so a school inspected since then will have a newer report on Ofsted's site.

Get Information About Schools: common questions

What is Get Information About Schools?

Get Information About Schools (GIAS) is the Department for Education's official register of educational establishments in England, at get-information-schools.service.gov.uk. It holds records for around 65,000 establishments, including academies, council-maintained schools, independent schools and children's centres, and it replaced the older EduBase system in 2017.

Is Get Information About Schools free to use?

Yes. Anyone can search it and download the public data files without an account. A DfE Sign-in account is only needed by schools, trusts and local authorities that update their own records.

How do I find a school's URN?

Search the school by name or postcode on GIAS, or in our school search: the six-digit unique reference number (URN) is shown on the record. A school gets a new URN when it converts to an academy, so older Ofsted reports can sit under its previous URN. GIAS links the old and new records.

Does Get Information About Schools show exam results or Ofsted reports?

No, not in full. GIAS is an administrative register. Exam and progress results are on the government's Compare school and college performance service, and inspection reports are on Ofsted's reports site. Each school page on Schools Insight links to its GIAS record and its Ofsted report.

Does GIAS cover Wales and Scotland?

No. GIAS covers establishments in England. Welsh schools are listed on My Local School, run by the Welsh Government, and Scottish schools on Parentzone Scotland.

Why can I not find a school on Schools Insight?

Our search covers the 18,640 open state-funded mainstream schools in the GIAS data. Independent schools, special schools, pupil referral units, nurseries and closed schools are not included, so search GIAS directly for those.