Guidance

DfE statistical work programme

Updated 30 June 2026

Applies to England

Introduction

This annual statistical work programme outlines key developments to official statistics published by the Department for Education (DfE) in academic year 2026 to 2027.

This work programme is the first in its series and fulfils the new requirement of the refreshed Code of Practice for Statistics. It includes high level, department-wide priorities, as well as specific potential changes to existing official statistics series.

Changes to existing official statistics series arise from, are informed by, or require engagement with our users. Engaging with our users helps to increase the relevance of our statistics, providing public value. This is underpinned by the Code of Practice for Statistics.

If you have feedback on the contents of this statistical work programme, or have general feedback regarding DfE statistics, contact DfE’s Head of Profession for Statistics at hop.statistics@education.gov.uk.

Background on DfE statistics

DfE publishes approximately 70 official statistics series on education and children, including on:

• early years
• schools
• further education
• higher education
• children and young people

This is carried out in line with:

• the Code of Practice for Statistics
• DfE official statistics: standards and policies.

We align our work with the 3 pillars of the Code of Practice for Statistics:

Trustworthiness

This includes ensuring transparency by pre-announcing releases and publishing at 09.30 on weekdays.

Quality

We continue to embed our quality-assurance principles in the 3 stages of statistics production:

• the underlying data
• the processes applied
• the resulting insight

Value

We maintain engagement with users of our statistics, including through this work programme.

Upcoming regular official statistics publications are announced on the statistics release calendar.

Explore Education Statistics (EES) includes all of DfE’s official statistics, whether regular or ad hoc, and some management information.

We have published official statistics on EES since 2020. Historic publications published before March 2020 can be found on GOV.UK. Statistics before May 2010 can be found in the National Archives.

We use dashboards to supplement the release of our statistics on EES –  for example, the Pupil attendance and absence in schools in England dashboard, which can be found on the Pupil attendance in schools statistics release page.

Priorities for DfE statistics

DfE has 4 department-wide priorities for how we produce and disseminate our statistics:

• embedding automation further with reproducible analytical pipelines (RAP)
• improving statistical quality
• developing our digital dissemination services
• making our data more widely available through an application programming interface (API)

We also continue to aim for harmonisation of common variables, including how we report on geography and ethnicity. This ensures our statistics meet best practice guidance, as well as improving the ease of navigating and understanding our statistics for our users. This ongoing work includes ensuring statistics reflect any changes to geographical boundaries, such as changes resulting from Local government reorganisation.

Reproducible analytical pipelines

Government analysts working with statistics are required to ensure that analysis is:

• reproducible
• maintainable
• transparent
• robust

RAP are a cross-government requirement to help analysts adopt best practices.

In 2023 DfE published its RAP Strategy Implementation Plan, which sets out our goals to:

• expand the breadth of our RAP expectations, guidance and support
• monitor and improve RAP progress in statistics production

We have an ambition to publish an updated RAP strategy plan in the coming year.

We have championed the use of RAP for statistics production since 2015 and continue to improve our processes by making them more efficient and automated. There is a clear expectation that any analyst producing statistics should be familiar with and implementing RAP principles, meeting at least the department’s definitions of “good” and “great” practice.

RAP principles

The department’s RAP principles align with the core principles of the Code of Practice for Statistics, and therefore support analysts who produce and publish official statistics to ensure these serve the public good. These are:

Trustworthiness

Within  the core principle of trustworthiness, standards 3 (“Be Transparent”) and 4 (“Manage Data Responsibly”) specify that official statistics must be transparent and that data must be managed safely and securely. These align with RAP principles such as using open source repositories, source data is acquired and stored sensibly, and files meet data standards.

Quality

Within the core principle of quality, standards 5 (“Prioritise quality”), 6 (“Be rigorous”), and 7 (“Be open about quality”) specify that:

• quality must be prioritised by promoting good practice
• suitable data sources and sound methods must be used
• quality of statistics must be prominently explained

These are supported by all of the RAP principles, but particularly by use appropriate tools, documentation, and publication-specific automated sense checks.

Value

The core principle of value stipulates that official statistics should be relevant, clear and accessible. The RAP principles support these by providing a framework to ensure that statistics production processes:

• are efficient and reproducible, maximising available time for responding to user feedback
• improve clarity of outputs
• ensure accessibility standards of outputs are being met

Statistical quality

The statistics produced by the department strive to be of good quality, one of the Code of Practice for Statistics principles.

Our approach to quality in official statistics is to review the adequacy and plausibility of our work across 3 stages of statistical production:

• the data underlying our statistics
• the processes applied to this data
• the insight resulting from these processes

This is complemented by 4 cross-cutting enablers:

• planning
• automation
• documentation
• change management

These stages and enablers of quality were launched in DfE in 2024 to 2025, and we will continue to embed these principles in the work we do through outreach across all statistical producers. We plan to expand the promotion of the principles through new mandatory training on a quarterly basis.

The principles align with standard 6 of the Code of Practice (“Be rigorous”) and our planned work to continue promoting them across teams with standard 5 (“Prioritise quality”).

We will continue to be transparent about the quality of our statistics (standard 7, “Be open about quality”), with all releases having a supporting methodology document, inviting feedback from users on any major changes and using official statistics in development labelling where appropriate. These principles are outlined in more detail in our quality management approach.

Digital dissemination services

Explore Education Statistics hosts publications labelled as:

• accredited official statistics
• official statistics
• official statistics in development
• ad hoc statistics
• management information releases

EES is built in line with the Government Digital Service Standard and the Statistics Code of Practice, in particular standard 10 for value (“Be Accessible”), ensuring that statistics are accessible and freely available to all.

The platform  makes it easier to publish engaging statistics that all users can find, navigate, interact with and take away. It remains in active development, with new features and feature improvements steadily being added to the service. Development is driven by user engagement across internal and external users to ensure continued value and relevance.

The value of the platform relies on the alignment between its functionality and the quality of the data and content it hosts. As such, platform development is closely linked to publishers’ understanding of how users engage with and benefit from their statistical content. To support this and to ensure that producers can put users at the centre of decision making about the statistics (standard 8, “Be Relevant”), DfE publishers receive curated insights on the use of their releases, drawing on data from multiple analytics sources.

DfE’s publishing community is an active user group and regularly identifies opportunities to enhance the platform. For example, in response to recent feedback, we have:

• made it easier for users to create their own tables
• improved charts functionality
• redesigned release pages to be more flexible

Going forward, our biggest priority for publishers is automating and streamlining the process of repeated releases, making it even more efficient to publish regular statistics.

In addition to engagement carried out by publishers, the EES service team undertakes wider user research to inform the development of the public website. Navigation has long been a challenge, and we continue to prioritise enhancements in this area. Recent improvements to search functionality have vastly reduced the time users spend locating publications. Looking ahead, we are:

• exploring natural language search for data products to further improve discoverability
• improving our data architecture to ensure the service can continue to handle large, complex datasets

The service has successfully passed its live service assessment and is now moving into the live phase, further demonstrating our commitment to continuous improvement and delivering a high-quality service.

Beyond our statistics releases on EES, we also have a clear framework for additional services that provide supplementary routes for accessing statistics, ensuring common data standards and efficient reuse (Value standard 10.5). At present, we:

• currently support around 20 public facing R Shiny dashboards that provide additional interactivity and new views on the data, as well as several related digital services that also present official statistics for different use cases
• contribute to the wider professional community on dashboard best practice with, for example, recent updates to the Analysis Function Dashboarding Guidance and the Office for Statistics Regulation’s regulatory dashboard guidance
• actively maintain several supporting libraries, making it easier for analysts to produce effective dashboards, including the cross-government shinyGovstyle package, applying the GOV.UK design system within R Shiny, and we endeavour to make appropriate code publicly available through our Analytical services GitHub area in line with Value standard 10.2.

Consistent with Value standard 9.8, we are keen to continually consider new ways to present data, and to better meet the needs of different types of users and potential users. We encourage anyone wanting to get involved in giving feedback or shaping the development of our digital statistics services to sign up to our user research list on the banner at the top of the EES service, or contact the team directly at explore.statistics@education.gov.uk.

Application programming interface dissemination

We have developed our own Explore education statistics API, adding the functionality on our publishing platform for statistics producers to efficiently create API data sets from the data they already publish. This provides an additional route to access our statistics, ensuring we publish in a way that is suitable for different types of users (Value standard 9.1).

As at May 2026, we have added 130 data set series onto the EES API, across 21 official statistics publications. Each data set series represents a CSV of data that will update with every future statistics release. Currently available API data sets can be found on the EES data catalogue.

Adding publication datasets onto an API gives our users many benefits and supports the reuse of data and statistics, ensuring easier, efficient reuse and linking (Value standard 10.5). In practice, this enables users to:

• connect directly to our databases, removing the need to download and store local copies and allowing automatic updates to flow through to dashboards and other services as soon as new data is released
• retrieve summary information about datasets and related resources, query data based on specific criteria, and download full underlying CSV files programmatically

DfE will continue working to make our most popular statistics accessible to users through the API, including through dedicated support tools such as the eesyapi R package and PowerBI connector. We will continue to monitor the usage of the API and user feedback to continually improve our service.

Changes to DfE statistics

Given budget and capacity constraints, we need to ensure that we prioritise our resources best according to public value. This means developing new and existing statistics where there are evidence gaps, and reducing or discontinuing statistics where engagement is low. This is in line with Value standard 8.3.

This section summarises possible changes to our existing publications by theme for the 2026 to 2027 academic year. The list is not exhaustive, nor are the changes within it certain. They intend to provide more detail about how we may apply user engagement to shape our statistical releases, and invite feedback on the entire portfolio. We will update users on our plans in the relevant publication. Where there is an intention to reduce or discontinue statistics, we will announce this at least 3 months in advance to allow users to provide feedback on our plans.

To provide feedback on individual publications, use the contact information provided in the “Help and related information” section of the relevant page on Explore Education Statistics.

Children’s social care

In the latest release of Children’s social work workforce statistics, published in March 2026 for the 2025 reporting year, we included data on base salary for full-time social workers for the first time as official statistics in development, by role, sex, ethnicity, age and time in service. We plan to work with local authorities to improve recording practices, with a view to potentially publish information on part-time workers and full time equivalent (FTE) pay in future years.

We plan to improve the timeliness of Stability measures for children looked after in England, by publishing both placement stability and social worker stability data in November or December each year in this release. This will bring forward the publication of social worker stability data by 4 months compared to the current publication schedule. To enable this, we are proposing to publish data on school stability biennially instead of annually. Information would be published in the spring following the relevant autumn Children looked after in England including adoptions publication and include data for both the latest year and the previous year. All stability data will be combined in one place in the Stability measures for children looked after in England series. Details on how to provide feedback on this proposal are included in the announcement on the publication page.

We propose to cease publication of Serious incident notification statistics. This follows ongoing concerns about the completeness and reliability of the data, as not all incidents meeting the definition of a serious incident are consistently notified. As a result, we have assessed that the serious incident notifications data is not sufficiently robust to support meaningful analysis or inform decision-making. In addition, user engagement with the publication is low, raising questions about its value and impact. At the same time, more comprehensive and timely information will be available through new reporting by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. This will include quarterly and annual publications providing breakdowns of rapid reviews by region, incident type, and child demographics, alongside emerging themes and in-depth reviews of complex or nationally significant issues. Given these developments, we believe discontinuing the DfE statistics will reduce duplication and improve the overall clarity and usefulness of safeguarding information. Details on how to provide feedback on this proposal are included in the announcement on the publication page.

Early years

We aspire to improve the timeliness of the publication of Early years foundation stage profile results statistics. These statistics are currently published in November each year, reflecting assessments taken in the summer term of the previous academic year.

We are exploring options to increase the speed of data collection and processing. For the next publication relating to the 2025 to 2026 academic year, we anticipate bringing the publication forward to October 2026, and aim for further improvements to timeliness in subsequent years.

The scope of the Funded early education and childcare publication will continue to adapt to the roll out of new childcare entitlements. For the next publication in July 2026, the statistics will reflect the third and final expansion to childcare entitlements, to include the 30-hour entitlement for 9-month to 2-year-olds that came into effect in September 2025.

Pupils and schools

In October 2025 we published an ad-hoc statistics release on Home to school transport based on a new data collection from local authorities.

This data is about pre-16 pupils or children of compulsory school age and below who are receiving home-to-school transport as well as post-16 learners who are receiving transport to education or training funded by their local authority.

In June 2026 we started publishing these statistics as an annual series as official statistics in development. This is to reflect that it is a new voluntary data collection, and we expect the quality of the data returns to improve over time as it becomes more established. We welcome feedback on this new series via the contact information provided on the publication page.

We are looking to reduce the frequency of our fortnightly Pupil attendance in schools publication. These attendance statistics provide an early indication of trends in attendance levels ahead of the more detailed termly absence statistics that are based on the school census. While the attendance publication remains widely used, evidence shows a consistent decline in usage year-on-year, and lower relative usage in the second half of the academic year.

We are therefore proposing to reduce the frequency of attendance statistics from fortnightly to monthly after the spring half term each year going forward, starting in 2026 to 2027. These changes will maintain transparency while enabling us to improve the statistics in terms of quality and insight. We are particularly aiming to develop timelier data on:

• year groups
• severe absence
• attendance in alternative provision and pupil referral units

Feedback on this proposal is welcome at the contact information on the release page.

School and college outcomes and performance

We are developing a new service to replace the Compare school and college performance (CSCP) website. The service will draw from school-level data published in the Key stage 2 attainment, Key stage 4 performance and A level and other 16 to 18 results accredited official statistics published on EES. We will review the content of our publications and requirements for our revised and final releases in line with the new service.

We will continue to adapt our statistics to changes in performance measures policy, reflecting the outcomes of consultations on key stage 4 and 16 to 19 performance measures. These are likely to result in changes to performance metrics and methodologies - for example, adjustments to Progress 8. We will be removing EBacc measures from our key stage 4 results publication and institution-level data from 2025 to 2026.

We plan to rename the A level and other 16 to 18 results publication to better reflect the landscape of qualifications available at age 16 to 19. The publication will incorporate disaggregated data for college groups and T Level attainment institution level data from 2025 to 2026.

We have developed a new English and maths progress matrix dashboard to help users better understand progress made between key stage 4 and 16 to 19 study, accompanying the A level and other 16 to 18 results release. We have also created a new Longer term destinations dashboard, which we plan to publish in 2026.

Teachers and school workforce

In April 2026, we renamed and changed our Teacher demand and postgraduate trainee need publication (previously known as ‘Postgraduate initial teacher training targets’) to focus on teacher demand trajectories.

These changes aim to help users understand the drivers of the postgraduate initial teacher training (PGITT) recruitment needs, and what the school system requires in terms of teacher workforce as pupil demographics shift. The release included a new Teacher workforce analysis dashboard to provide data in a user friendly and accessible format. Feedback on these changes is welcome at the contact details available on the release page.

For School workforce in England statistics, we are planning to extend changes brought in the last release, to calculate pay statistics using Teacher Pension Scheme (TPS) administrative data, rather than school-reported School Workforce Census pay data.

This methodological improvement was brought in 2025 (after an ad-hoc statistics release in 2024 titled Median teacher pay using teacher pension scheme data) to help overcome known issues with reported School Workforce Census pay data not reflecting in full the latest pay awards, due to the timing of the collection. As improvements to data matching increased quality, we are aiming to make the main TPS-based statistics available at a more granular level. These statistics ensure that there is an accurate and up-to-date set of figures for average teacher pay in the public domain. Further information on estimates from TPS administrative data is available in the statistics release.

We also plan to expand the school workforce collection in 2027 to 2028 to include employees from multi-academy trusts, thereby filling a long-term gap, and exploring adding more fields on protected characteristics to the collection.

In the next release of Teacher and leader development: ECF and NPQs in July 2026, we will change badging from official statistics in development to official statistics.

The development phase has now ended, as we assess the methods and coverage to be robust. The release is also anticipated to broaden its scope by including teacher workforce coverage statistics for government-funded teacher career professional development (CPD) programmes. This responds to user requests for statistics showing the workforce coverage of early career framework (ECF) and national professional qualifications (NPQs) together and the overlap between them. Subject to data collection, new statistics for Teaching School Hubs (TSH) acting as delivery partners for ECF and NPQ programmes may be added to the release.

Destinations of pupils and students and further and higher education

In the June 2026 release of the Participation in education, training and employment age 16 to 18 publication, we moved to use the Young Persons Matched Administrative Data (YPMAD) where previously we used separate unmatched sources (individualised learner record (ILR), school census, Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)). This enables additional breakdowns and improves transparency and quality of the administrative data, as the methodology takes better account of overlaps between sources and simplifies processing.

Estimates for wider training and employment were sourced directly from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Previously, the LFS was used and proportions adjusted and averaged over periods. This change will improve comparability and transparency of official estimates of participation and NEET. We also extended the reported age range from 16 to 18 to 16 to 21, and included analysis by pupil characteristics, prior attainment, and geography. This helps us to further understand reasons for non-participation in education and apprenticeships.

We have been working to improve the timeliness of our Further education workforce statistics, bringing them closer to school workforce statistics to enable timelier reporting of trends in all teachers. We have brought forward the data collection schedule from October to January to July to September. As a result, we will release 2 further education workforce publications in 2026 (in May and in December), and we will then publish in December each year going forwards.

Beyond specific changes to our publications, some DfE releases are now jointly produced by DfE and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). This reflects Machinery of Government changes that split responsibility for further education, skills, training and careers between DfE for those aged 19 and under and DWP for adult learners. These responsibilities fall under the remit of the joint Minister for Skills.

The following publications will continue to be published on EES with joint branding from DfE and DWP from their next release:

• Further Education and Skills
• Apprenticeships
• Apprenticeships in England by industry characteristics
• Further education outcomes
• Skills bootcamps starts, completions and outcomes
• NEET age 16 to 24

In higher education, DfE plans to merge 2 existing publications covering Widening participation (WP) in higher education and Participation measures in higher education (CHEP) into one annual publication. The merged publication is expected to be released in July 2026 and will include statistics on progression to higher education by age 19 (currently published in WP) and ages 20, 25 and 30 (currently published in CHEP). It will also bring together characteristics and breakdowns for progression rates currently featured across both publications. Merging these publications will:

• consolidate statistics on progression to higher education, making it easier for users to find information of most use to them
• make it possible to publish data in a timelier manner

The merged publication will be accompanied by a new dashboard for interactive exploration of the statistics, which will make it easier for users to access and understand the data through clear visualisations and filters.

For the Higher Level Learners in England publication, we plan to expand the scope of the statistics to include learners studying towards Skills Bootcamps at levels 4 and 5. This will initially be introduced in the next annual publication scheduled for October 2026. Including Skills Bootcamps (at levels 4 and 5) will provide users with a more comprehensive and complete overview of higher-level learning at levels 4 and above in England, across all types of qualifications. It will also bring this series in line with other higher education publications that include Skills Bootcamps, such as Participation measures in higher education.

Cross-cutting statistics

We have published information on Local authority and school expenditure for education, children’s services (including youth justice), early years, and high needs place funding since 2001 and 2002. The aim of this publication is to provide information on local authority outturn spend both at national level and for each local authority.

We have reviewed the value and quality of this publication and invited feedback from users on our plans to cease the publication of this series between December 2025 and May 2026. Given low engagement with the release, user feedback, and availability of data through other routes, we will cease publication of this official statistics series going forward. To maintain transparency, section 251 outturn data will be made available on GOV.UK alongside s251 budget, and we are aiming to publish this ahead of when the next iteration of this release would have been due (December). We will also release a data aggregation guide for section 251 so that users can recreate the tables in the publication. Consistent Financial Reporting (CFR) data will continue to be available on the Financial Benchmarking and Insights tool with improvements to accessibility and timeliness.

We invited feedback from users on our plans to streamline the Education and training statistics for the UK publication, due to be next published in November 2026, having identified areas of duplication and low engagement. For statistics on higher education, schools, expenditure, NEET, pupil-to-teacher ratios, and post-compulsory institutions, we will stop reporting our aggregations and instead signpost to publicly available UK statistics elsewhere, as the publication adds limited value to the already available data.

We are considering increasing scope to signpost to, or add new aggregations for, attainment and attendance statistics, which would provide more value to have comparable or aggregated statistics for. This publication provides information on coherence of education statistics across UK nations. As such, developments to this publication are a key priority of the Government Statistical Service Children and Education workplan and the Government Statistical Service coherence work programme.

Official statistics in development

A number of our regular series are currently labelled as official statistics in development. These are new or existing statistics that we are actively testing and refining with users, in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics and its principles of trustworthiness, quality and value.

This label is temporary. Following evaluation, these statistics may become official statistics, continue in development, or be discontinued if they do not meet user needs.

Table 1 lists all official statistics in development, alongside a summary of their current stage of development. For each item, feedback can be provided via the ‘contact us’ section of the relevant release.

Table 1: official statistics in development

Title of release	Details of development
Stability measures for children looked after in England	Statistics on the stability of Children Looked After in their placement, at school and in their professional support. Social worker stability data was collected for the first time in 2024 and quality of returns is still improving as the collection becomes established. Scheduling of this release is under review with a proposal to move the school stability indicator to biennially instead of annually.
Provisional T Level results	Provisional T Level outcomes for students completing T Levels, as reported to the Department for Education through the manage T Level results service. T levels are still in their roll out phase with new subjects being added each year, as such users should exercise caution when drawing conclusions on trends between years.
NEET age 16 to 24	Annual estimates from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) of young people aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training (NEET) in England. The Office for National Statistics have faced challenges around the falling number of responses to the LFS, which has led to increased sampling variability and uncertainty in estimates. The statistics are therefore badged as “in development” until further review.
Children missing education	Provides data reported by local authorities on children missing education in England. The collection became mandatory in autumn 2024, and we expect the quality of the data returns to continue to improve over time as the collection becomes established.
Elective home education	Provides data reported by local authorities on children in elective home education in England. The collection became mandatory in autumn 2024, and we expect the quality of the data returns to continue to improve over time as the collection becomes established.
UK revenue from education related exports and transnational education activity	Estimates of UK revenue from education-related exports and transnational education (TNE) activity. This latest release uses new methodology responding to recommendations from LSE Consulting’s report published in March 2023. Figures were published for both the new and previous methodology to enable users to understand the impact of the change. We are proposing to fully move to the new methodology for the next publication.