Putting schools in a table and sorting by a column takes about ten seconds. Working out why one school sits at the top and another at the bottom, and what to do about it, can take a term.
For trust and group leaders, that second part is the whole point of benchmarking education performance. This guide covers how to approach benchmarking in schools so it explains differences rather than just ranking them: comparing like with like, separating real performance gaps from differences in intake, and deciding where support or challenge is needed.
A fair comparison shows you not just which schools differ but why, and that’s what tells you where to put support.
Education benchmarking means comparing a school’s performance against a reference point. That might be other schools in the same trust or group, similar schools nationally, or the school’s own results from previous years.
In England, the DfE’s Compare school and college performance service gives a public starting point for external comparison. Inside a trust or group, leaders usually want something more detailed and more current: how their own schools compare on attendance, behaviour, attainment, admissions and more, this term.
Either way, the purpose of benchmarking isn’t the ranking. It’s knowing where leadership attention will make the biggest difference.
Raw comparisons between schools are easy to produce and easy to misread. The most common reasons:
Fair multi-school data comparison starts with a few principles.
Agree definitions first. Make sure every school calculates key measures the same way, from persistent absence to retention. This matters even more in international groups, where schools may follow different curricula and use different systems.
Compare progress as well as attainment. Where pupils end up matters, but so does how far they’ve come.
Compare similar groups. Look at how comparable groups of pupils perform across schools, such as pupils with similar prior attainment, rather than only whole-school averages.
Look at trends. Three terms of data tell you far more than one.
Bring in context. Changes in leadership, staffing, intake or local circumstances often explain differences that the numbers alone can’t.
Once you’ve compared fairly, the question becomes: what does the difference mean, and what should we do?
Useful benchmarking questions sound like this:
That last question is often the most valuable. Benchmarking isn’t only about finding schools that need support. It’s also about finding practice worth sharing.
Attendance is a common place to start. Our guide to spotting attendance and behaviour patterns early covers what to look for within a school before you compare across them.
For many multi academy trusts and school groups, trustwide school data reporting still means collecting returns from each school, reconciling them in a central spreadsheet and building a board pack. By the time it’s finished, the data is weeks old, and the board’s follow-up questions start the process again.
Good MAT analytics turns that around. Leaders can ask the same question of every school, see the answer side by side, and explore the reasons behind the differences, without waiting for the next data collection. Our data strategy guide for trusts covers how to set that up.
EduIntelligence helps trust and group leaders compare schools, understand why performance differs and prioritise where leadership attention will have the greatest impact. Leaders ask a question in plain language, and EI brings together the relevant information from across their schools, explores the patterns, shows the evidence and suggests next steps.
What if you could ask every school the same question? See how EI works for trusts and school groups, find help in our user guides, or book a demo to explore group-wide intelligence.
