WRITTEN ON August 7th, 2007 BY Schools person AND STORED IN Uncategorized

One of my pet hates about the DfES is the difficulty in getting a list of schools out of them.

If you want a list of Scottish schools, you can find them here.

I’m pretty sure I found the Northern Ireland equivalent some time ago (but I can’t find it today) although the Welsh equivalent is not easily available.

But for English schools – for which the DfES are responsible – it is a bit more difficult. You get responses like:

Thank you for your recent email enquiry.

For information on schools in England, I suggest you get in touch with Edubase – The Schools Register. Their contact details are as follows:

Edubase
Rosewharf
East Street
Leeds LS9 8EE
Helpline: 0870 120 2527
Fax: 0113 285 6508
Email: helpdesk@edubase.gov.uk

I hope this information is helpful to you.

If you have any further questions why not browse our Popular Questions website. This site has been built to allow you to quickly find the answer to your question http://www.dfes.gov.uk/popularquestions/

Guy Manly
Department for Education and Skills
Telephone 0870 000 2288
Fax 01928 79 4248
Text phone/Minicom 01928 79 4274

—–Original Message—–
From: Schools Person [mailto:vaguelyplausibleemail@address.com]
Sent: 14 June 2006 23:55

To: PEU, Information
Subject: FoI Publication Scheme

I cannot find a list of schools in England on the website. Ideally what I am looking for is a spreadsheet listing the following info about all schools in England

School Unique Identifier
Name
Type
PostCode
LEA
LEA Numeric ID
NOR

Is it available somewhere ? Many thanks

So I phone up Edubase and they want about £15K for a list of all the state schools in England. That are paid for out of taxpayers money. I find that a bit rich. The Information Commissioner was encouraging me to get down and get dirty with them (the DfES), because he believed they hadn’t a leg to stand on. But to tell you the truth I just hadn’t the time to push them all the way. So I dropped it. But at least they are upfront about it

What I wanted the list for was to look at trying to connect governors locally, to pool resources and efforts. Governors are all unpaid volunteers and most do not claim any expenses. Trying to get money spent on governance can be a struggle in many schools. So any sharing of the load would probably be appreciated.

If you go to the Edubase site you will see that they do allow public search of the entire database, but they restrict the amount of data that can be returned. And the mapping functionality that they host is pretty poor. Why not just put the data onto Google Maps/Earth? Why get ESRI to create a poor Google-clone, which seems like what they have done. The functionality is already over on Google.

Surely this information should be freely available to the public and we should be able to see all our schools on Google Maps/Earth?