What is a school URN?

A URN is a six-digit number that identifies a school or college in England. It is the only reliable way to join data sets together.

England · 2024/25 · DfEPlain-English guide

What it is

The Unique Reference Number is assigned by the Department for Education and recorded in Get Information About Schools, the national register of educational establishments. Every school, college and other provider has one. It stays with the institution across name changes, headteacher changes and building moves.

Why the Explorer joins on URN and never on name

Institution names are not unique, not stable and not consistently punctuated. There are multiple “St Mary’s” and multiple “The Sixth Form College”. Names change when a school converts, joins a trust or rebrands. Matching on name would silently create duplicates and silently lose institutions.

Every join in this Explorer — entries to characteristics, characteristics to coordinates — is made on URN. The GIAS coordinate join matched 2,792 of 2,792 URNs exactly.

Where you can see it

Every institution profile in the Explorer shows its URN, and the institution search accepts a URN directly. You can look the same number up in Get Information About Schools for the full official record.

Related guides

Explained

Why do schools sometimes change URN?

A URN identifies a legal entity, not a building. Academy conversion, mergers and re-establishment all create new numbers.

Explained

How is post-16 subject provision measured?

The exact method behind the Explorer: which rows are used, how totals are counted, and what the denominator is.

Explained

School sixth form vs sixth-form college vs FE college

The institution types in post-16 education in England, and why the distinction changes what you should expect from the numbers.

Sources & methodology: All figures come from the DfE’s Schools and colleges — subject entries and grades and institution information data sets for academic year 2024/25 (final), joined on school URN. Only the Total exam entries category is used, so no entry is counted twice. Coverage is measured against the number of institutions with recorded entries in the relevant qualification family, not against all establishments. Sixth-form consortia and partnership centres are excluded from all totals, denominators and percentages, because DfE excludes them from its national figures; they remain listed and flagged in the Explorer. On that basis the England A-level total of 787,688 entries reconciles with the DfE national comparator to within 0.16%, and the four families together to within 0.15%. Institution coordinates come from Get Information About Schools. T Levels do not appear in this release; they are shown separately on the Explorer’s T Levels tab, from DfE provider-level T Level results, and are never added to any entry total here.

Last checked 17 August 2026. Observed provision is based on recorded exam entries. An institution with no recorded entries in a subject may still have offered it — see what subject provision means.