Terms of use

About these terms

School Wisely is run by [Controller name] (“we”, “us”), an individual based in the UK. Contact: [Contact email — e.g. privacy@schoolwisely.co.uk]; [Postal address — a business address service is fine]. School Wisely is free: there is nothing to pay and nothing to buy. By using the website or the app you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use them.

What School Wisely is, and is not

School Wisely brings together published information about schools in England — results, inspections, admissions arrangements and neighbourhood statistics — so parents can compare them. It is an information service, free to use. It is not advice about which school to choose, and it is not run by, connected with or endorsed by any school, council, the Department for Education or Ofsted.

Admissions information: always check with the school and council

Admissions details on School Wisely — priority and catchment areas, furthest distances offered, entry criteria, key dates and the address check — are for information only. Only the admission authority (the school or the council) decides who is offered a place, using its own policy, measurements and the year's applications. In particular:

• Priority areas are drawn from the published documents. Some edges are approximate: a dashed edge on the map is built from postcodes, so an address near it may fall either side.
• Distances are straight lines from the school's registered location. Councils measure their own way, sometimes by walking route, and from different points.
• Furthest distances offered are what happened in past years. They change every year and are not a promise of a place.
• Policies, dates and test arrangements change. We show the period each fact refers to; it may not be the year you are applying for.
• For the Buckinghamshire grammar schools, the priority areas come from Buckinghamshire Council's Priority Area Checker data. Confirm an address with the council, through its school admissions pages or its admissions team.

Before you rely on anything for an application, check the school's current admissions policy and your council's admissions information and deadlines. Each fact on School Wisely links to the source it came from so you can do that.

Accuracy of the information

We take every figure from a named, published source and record the edition we read, the period it describes and when we read it. Sources can still contain mistakes, become out of date, or be read wrongly by us. We do not promise that the information is complete, accurate or current. If something looks wrong, the linked source shows what was published; please tell us at [Contact email — e.g. privacy@schoolwisely.co.uk] and we will correct it.

Using the site and the app

You may use School Wisely for your own, non-commercial purposes, and you are welcome to link to any page. Please do not:

• copy or download the site or its data in bulk, or use automated tools (scrapers, bots) to do so — the underlying official data is available from its publishers, linked on our sources page;
• try to break, overload or get around the security of the website, the app or our database;
• sign anyone else up to a waitlist or use an email address that is not yours;
• use School Wisely in a way that is unlawful, or to mislead or harass anyone;
• present School Wisely's information as an official decision about a school place.

Accounts and waitlists

Accounts and waitlists are for adults (18 or over). Sign-in works by a link sent to your email address, so keep access to that email account secure. You can sign out or delete your account yourself in the app (menu → Account), and ask us to delete a waitlist entry at any time. We may suspend an account or remove a waitlist entry that breaks these terms.

Paid features are not available yet. Joining a waitlist does not commit you to anything. If we launch paid features, they will come with their own terms and prices, which you will see before paying.

Sources, licences and trade marks

• Official data from the Department for Education, Ofsted, the Office for National Statistics and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government: contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. Postcode locations also contain Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right.
• The base map: data from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License), in the OpenMapTiles format, with map tiles from OpenFreeMap. The map shows these credits in its corner (behind an “i” button on small screens).
• Buckinghamshire grammar schools' priority areas: © Buckinghamshire Council. No licence is stated; we show them to identify each school's area, credited, and point to the council for confirmation. If you are the rights holder and object, contact us.
• Schools' and councils' documents are quoted briefly, with a link to the original and an archived copy.
• School names (and any school logos we show) belong to their owners. We use them only to identify the school; it does not mean the school endorses School Wisely. A school can ask us to remove its logo.
• Our own text, design and the way we bring the data together are © [Controller name]. “School Wisely” is our name.

Every source, its licence and the editions behind the pages are listed on About and data sources.

Availability and changes to the service

School Wisely is free and provided as it is. We may change, pause or stop any part of it, and it may sometimes be unavailable, for example while we update the data or if a service we rely on is down.

Links to other websites (schools, councils, data publishers) are for your convenience; we are not responsible for their content.

Our responsibility to you

If we fail to take reasonable care in providing School Wisely, we are responsible for loss you suffer that was a foreseeable result of that failure. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, for business losses (School Wisely is for personal use), or for the decisions admission authorities make about school places.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited or excluded by law, and nothing affects your legal rights as a consumer.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, for example when we add features or when the law changes. The date at the top shows the current version. If you have an account, we will email you about important changes before they take effect.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales can hear any dispute. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your local courts.

Contact

[Contact email — e.g. privacy@schoolwisely.co.uk] · [Postal address — a business address service is fine]