Education data guide
Division 85 is not the school sector. It is the private training market, and once you know that the data becomes useful rather than confusing.
Education is a single SIC division, 85, and it is one of the most misread sectors on the register.
It is not schools
State schools are not companies. Local authority maintained schools do not appear at all. Academies and multi-academy trusts usually are companies, typically limited by guarantee and registered as charities, so they do appear, but they sit alongside a much larger population of something else entirely.
What division 85 mostly contains is the private training and education services market: independent training providers, tutoring businesses, driving instructors, language schools, corporate trainers, exam preparation, coaching, and the support services that sell into education.
The codes that carry most of it:
- 85320 technical and vocational secondary education
- 85590 other education not elsewhere classified, which is the largest and vaguest
- 85600 educational support services
85590 is a catch-all and it is where the majority of small training businesses end up. Treat it as "training and tutoring, unspecified" and you will be roughly right.
What that makes it good for
If you sell into education, the register gives you the independent side of the market, which is the part with no central directory. State schools are listed by the DfE. Academy trusts are listed by the DfE. Private training providers are listed nowhere, and there are a lot of them.
Formation data matters here for the usual reason: a training business incorporating this month has no LMS, no insurance, no booking system and no accountant.
What the register does not hold
- Ofsted registration or inspection outcomes
- ESFA or apprenticeship provider status
- Awarding body approval or accreditation
- Learner numbers, funding, or what is actually taught
- Whether the provider is a charity, which is the Charity Commission register
For anything regulated or funded, the register tells you the company exists and the regulator tells you whether it is allowed to operate. In education those are frequently different answers.
What people in the sector actually do with it
- Build a list of independent providers by area, which exists nowhere else
- Find newly formed training businesses, before supplier decisions are made
- Check a provider's corporate age and status before partnering or referring
- Map where private provision concentrates, and where it is thin
- Track closures, which in this sector are frequent and quiet
- Separate the corporate education market from the state sector, which most analyses fail to do
Where to start
The education sector view breaks division 85 down code by code, with formations and dissolutions.
If you need a specific cut, tell us what it is.
See the data for education
The register broken down by sector, and the datasets that apply to it.