Guidance

Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) user guide

A user guide for the linked administrative data on education, assessment and university admissions available in the GRADE data set.

• From: Ofqual
• Published: 29 April 2022
• Last updated: 21 July 2025 — See all updates

Applies to England

Documents

Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) user guide

Ref: Ofqual/25/7198

HTML

Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) user guide

Ref: Ofqual/25/7198

PDF, 407 KB, 20 pages

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Details

The Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) data sharing project is a joint open data initiative by Ofqual, the Department for Education (DfE) and UCAS. Its main objective is to provide accredited external researchers with access to data to conduct independent research on the educational, assessment and admission systems in England, and to facilitate internal analysis.

Published 29 April 2022

Last updated 21 July 2025 + show all updates

1. 21 July 2025

   Added information for the new lookup table of pseudonymised unique school reference numbers in the DfE dataset.

2. 24 January 2025

   Added PDF file for Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) user guide and removed GRADE framework files, which are superseded by the user guide.

3. 8 January 2025

   Added the HTML page 'Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) user guide'.

4. 29 April 2022

   First published.