Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 7 February 2023 to Question 135240 on Schools: Houghton and Sunderland South, what processes are required to prepare the detailed school level data from the Condition Data Collection programme for publication; and in which (a) formats and (b) locations does she plan to publish that data.

The Department is still working to publish information from the Condition Data Collection programme (CDC) as soon as possible.

The Department has considered publishing each of the 22,031 individual school CDC reports. These are very large documents and publishing the data in this way would not make it easy to compare one school with another, or for researchers or others to draw useful insights from the data. Instead, the Department plans to publish data on the ‘Explore Education Statistics’ (EES) website where departmental statistics and transparency data are published. The data will be able to be filtered on the EES website so that users can access CDC data for individual schools, and it will also be published in a spreadsheet format to enable easy interrogation of the data.

The CDC dataset contains 4.2 million rows of data. When it goes on the EES website, it will be the largest school level dataset on the service. The Department has had to undertake development work on the platform that supports this website to make it sufficiently robust to handle this unprecedented volume of data.