About Census Area Explorer

Census Area Explorer lets you combine area statistics — the England & Wales 2021 Census, England school and sixth-form data, and England affordable-housing data — into a single weighted score and see it painted onto a map, area by area. You choose the statistics and the weights; the score is your formula, not ours.

It exists because deciding where to rent or buy usually means eyeballing five separate maps and holding the trade-offs in your head. This tool puts every area-related statistic in one place and turns your priorities into one comparable number.

The data is the England & Wales 2021 Census, published by the Office for National Statistics, school characteristics, Key Stage 4 results and A level results published by the Department for Education, and affordable housing supply and net additional dwellings published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — all under the Open Government Licence, on boundaries published by Ordnance Survey. Every map you build cites the sources it uses.

The school figures cover England only, for the 2024/25 school year. Welsh areas have no school data and are left blank: Welsh schools are not in the Department for Education's registers, and Welsh performance measures are published on a basis that is not comparable with Attainment 8. Attainment is offered three ways, and none is a promise of a place at any school. "At the nearest secondary" is exactly that: the published result of the nearest state-funded mainstream secondary, whoever actually goes there. The other two are models of the same thing — the Attainment 8 of the children who live in an area — and they are published side by side because they disagree. "Of pupils living here" spreads each area's children across the schools around them by distance, holding every school to the size of the cohort it really published. "Best schools fill first" works through the schools in order of their own results, each taking the closest children still unplaced, on the reasoning that a school families want fills up from close by and one they do not has to reach further out; grammar and independent schools go first and draw evenly from ten miles, since neither admits on distance. Both are estimates of where children go, not records of it: no open data says which school a household's children attend, and neither model has any way to know who passes a grammar school's entrance test. "Schools serving the area" shows how many schools the first of the two rests on. The A level figures are a further estimate built on the first of those models: each area's pupils are followed from their modelled secondary schools, through the leaver destinations those schools publish, to the state-funded sixth forms and colleges around them. They describe the results and subject mix of the places an area's students are modelled to study, not of the students themselves, and unlike Attainment 8 no residence-based A level figure is published to check them against. Independent schools are not included.

The affordable-housing figures cover England only, and Welsh areas are left blank: the Welsh Government publishes an equivalent on a different collection basis, with different tenure categories, that is not comparable with these. They count homes completed as new build over the last 5 and last 15 years, so they run below the government's headline figure, which also counts affordable homes bought from the existing market. Percentages are a share of net additional dwellings — everything built, converted or brought back into use, less demolitions — so an authority that lost more homes than it gained shows no percentage rather than a negative one. One thing to read carefully: this is published per local authority and nowhere finer, so every area inside a council area shows that council's figure. It answers "how much affordable housing has this council built", not "how much has been built on this street".