How I built an Ofsted school data API on Apify (without scraping a single webpage)
Daniel Ainsworth developed an Ofsted school data API using Apify without web scraping. The API accesses official government CSV files containing inspection data for over 22,000 state-funded schools in England. The project highlights a straightforward approach to data accessibility through parsing rather than scraping.
- ▪The Ofsted data API was built using official government CSV files published on GOV.UK.
- ▪The API allows users to filter school data based on various criteria such as name and postcode.
- ▪Ofsted recently updated their grading system, which required adjustments in the API to accommodate new grading formats.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/danielainsworth/how-i-built-an-ofsted-school-data-api-on-apify-without-scraping-a-single-webpage-mnj |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 21:21:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T21:29:38.368Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T21:29:38.368Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | kJoul3G2fKKB |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3954791) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Daniel Ainsworth Posted on May 28 How I built an Ofsted school data API on Apify (without scraping a single webpage) #webdev #typescript #opensource #datascience Most scraping projects start by finding a website to scrape. This one started from the opposite direction: I knew the data existed as official government downloads, and my job was to make it accessible via a clean API.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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