England has expanded education. It hasn't closed the education gap.
At 11, disadvantaged pupils are 22 percentage points behind their peers in reaching the expected standard. At 16, the gap in strong English and maths GCSE passes is 27.3 points — and pupils eligible for free school meals are more than two and a half times as likely to be persistently absent.
England, not the UK
Education is devolved. Every figure on this page is England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland operate different frameworks with different legal definitions, and their figures are not directly comparable.
So what happens between starting school and leaving it?
Twelve chapters follow that question: what education costs, whether children are learning more, who runs schools, special educational needs, attendance, behaviour and exclusion, teachers, who gets left behind, what school actually leads to, who pays for a degree, and where it goes next. All twelve are live, each built from a verified data pipeline rather than from secondary summaries, and each declares what its data cannot show.
School tells us how pupils perform. The next question is what that performance leads to.
- Chapter 1Eighty years of educationFrom the 1944 Act to the 2026 white paper — and why the data starts in 1988.Read the chapter
- Chapter 2What education costsCash spending, what the figure leaves out, and the rising share of schools in deficit.Read the chapter
- Chapter 3Are children learning more?Attainment over time — and why four rebuilds of the measure make the obvious chart misleading.Read the chapter
- Chapter 4Who runs our schools?Academies, maintained and independent schools — counted in schools and in pupils.Read the chapter
- Chapter 5Special educational needs and disabilitiesEHC plans, the statutory route, the numbers, attainment, money, appeals, the workforce, and the limits of the published data.Read the chapter
- Chapter 6Attendance and missing educationPersistent absence, children missing education, and the rise in home education.Read the chapter
- Chapter 7Behaviour and exclusionSuspensions, permanent exclusions, and the four-nation split on behaviour policy.Read the chapter
- Chapter 8Teachers and the workforceWho works in state schools, and why full-time equivalent is not a headcount.Read the chapter
- Chapter 9Who gets left behind?The disadvantage gap, what the index actually measures, and how little it has moved.Read the chapter
- Chapter 10From classroom to workWhat schools teach, who goes to university, who takes an apprenticeship — and what each path actually leads to.Read the chapter
- Chapter 11The price of a degreeTuition, loans, interest and repayment — and who actually ends up paying for a degree.Read the chapter
- Chapter 12Where education goes nextCurrent proposals, their legal status, and their precedents.Read the chapter
Source: DfE, Pupil absence in schools in England, 2024/25 (published 26 March 2026), for the free-school-meals persistent-absence comparison in the hero above. The two attainment gaps above are computed from the same Key stage 2 and Key stage 4 performance releases the chapters below draw on.
Alongside the chapters: Britain vs Europe
The ten chapters above are about England, because that is what the Department for Education publishes. One further page steps outside that frame: it places England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland separately into the European field on the measures where one instrument measured every country the same way — and says plainly, with reasons, where no such comparison can be made.
Britain vs Europe: education and youth outcomes →Live now: special educational needs and disabilities
Covers all children and young people aged 0 to 25 with an EHC plan, including those in early years settings, further education, and those educated elsewhere. This is NOT a school-pupil population and must never be used as a numerator or denominator against school-census SEN figures.
718,838
Children and young people with an EHC plan
2025/26, England, ages 0–25
+12.5%
Change on the previous year
Compared with the same census point a year earlier
46.1%
New plans issued within 20 weeks
DfE headline measure, excluding statutory exceptions
Sixteen sections drawing on the Department for Education, the Ministry of Justice, Ofqual, the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Department of Education. It explains what an EHC plan is in law, walks the statutory route, sets out the caseload, attainment, funding, appeals and the workforce, tracks what reform has actually changed, and is explicit about the questions the published statistics cannot answer.
Read Chapter 5 →Last verified 2026-08-16. Data: DfE, Education, health and care plans.
Related sections
- Public financesWhere education spending sits in the whole of government spending.
- HampshireLocal-authority-level figures, including the local SEND caseload.
- How votes become seatsThe same computed-claims method, applied to elections.
- Political donationsThe same evidence-chain discipline, applied to money in politics.
How this section is built
Every statistic is computed from a published dataset at build time and carries the date it was verified. No figure is typed into a page by hand, and none is taken from a secondary summary. Where a chapter is not yet live, it is because the pipeline behind it has not been built and checked — not because the topic was skipped.