An independent reader for official UK area evidence.

There are four published surfaces. School inspections carry Ofsted’s latest recorded outcome for each school in England, with the inspection and publication dates and a link to the report itself. Care services carry the Care Quality Commission’s registration record for each location in England — care homes, homecare agencies, GP practices, dentists, clinics and hospitals. Registered providers group those locations under the legal entity CQC names. Area briefs join Census, road and traffic evidence at local-authority level for the areas where enough of it is held to be worth publishing. The postcode search on the home page runs the same joins live across Great Britain, subject to the source and licensing boundaries recorded on the data-sources page.

A single “best place” number would bury value judgements inside an average and mix geographies that are not comparable, so none is produced. Ofsted outcomes are reproduced exactly as published, including the ungraded and monitoring results that are not on the same scale as a graded judgement. The CQC care directory records registration, not quality: it does not carry the CQC rating, and no page here infers one. Where a dataset holds nothing for an area, that is shown as a gap rather than as a zero, because an absent join is not evidence that nothing exists there.

Ofsted inspects schools in England, and the CQC regulates care in England. Those two sections therefore stop at the English border, and pages for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland point at the responsible regulator instead of substituting an English dataset. Census, road-collision and traffic evidence covers a wider footprint, but each figure is labelled with the geography it describes — often a local authority, which is much larger than the postcode that was searched.

Place Checker is an independent site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated on behalf of Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission, the Office for National Statistics, the Department for Transport, the Charity Commission or any other body named on this site. Public sector information is reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where a source states other terms; see the Data sources & licences page for the terms attached to each dataset.

Nothing here is edited by hand, so a wrong name, address or outcome on this site is a wrong value in the published source, or a fault in how it was loaded. If a record looks wrong, check it against the official record linked from every page — that record governs. Where the source has since been corrected, the correction reaches this site at the next refresh of that dataset.

To investigate efficiently, keep the Place Checker permanent URL, the official source URL, the source identifier (such as a URN or CQC location ID), the field in question and the value shown by each site. That distinguishes an upstream correction from a loading fault without collecting personal information about the person reporting it.