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How I built an Ofsted school data API on Apify (without scraping a single webpage)

DEV Community: datascience·Daniel Ainsworth·3 days ago
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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.…

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