How I built an Ofsted school data API on Apify (without scraping a single webpage)
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. The data source Ofsted (the UK school inspections body) publishes monthly management information as CSV files on GOV.UK. The file covers all 22,000+ state-funded schools in England with their latest inspection grades, local authority, postcode, phase, and size data. It's 16 MB, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 — explicitly permitting commercial use. No scraping needed. No authentication. Just a CSV download and some parsing logic. The architecture The actor is deliberately simple: Fetch the GOV.UK stats page to find the current month's CSV URL (the URL hash changes with each release) Download the CSV (~16 MB from assets.publishing.service.gov.uk ) Parse it with csv-parse Apply the user's filters (name, local authority, region, postcode prefix) Push matching records to the Apify dataset No Crawlee. No browser. No proxy. Just fetch() and a CSV parser. const match = html . match ( /href=" ( https: \/\/ assets \. publishing \. service \. gov \. uk \/[^ " ] +latest_inspections_as_at [^ " ] + \. csv ) "/ ); That one regex does the URL discovery. The GOV.UK page lists files in reverse chronological order, so the first match is always the latest release. The interesting part: Ofsted changed their grading system mid-build I built this in May 2026. In November 2025, Ofsted scrapped their 20-year-old four-word judgement system (Outstanding / Good / Requires Improvement / Inadequate) and replaced it with a report card format — six separate grade areas, each on a five-point scale: Exceptional Strong Expected standard Needs attention Urgent improvement Plus a standalone Safeguarding verdict (Met / Not met). The April 2026 CSV reflects this change entirely. There's no "Overall effectiveness" column. Schools inspected before November 2025 have null gr