How this works
The problem
At sixteen you make a decision that shapes the next five years, using a handful of prospectuses and whichever open evenings your parents could get to. Meanwhile the government publishes, every month, a complete list of every publicly funded course in England. It runs to nearly a hundred thousand rows and is not readable by a human being. This site makes it readable.
What the matching actually does
Five components produce a score out of 100. Nothing is hidden: each course on your results page lists the components that fired for it.
- Subject fit, up to 45 points. Your interests map onto subject areas with a weight. Liking engines counts fully for motor vehicle and strongly for engineering.
- Level fit, up to 25 points. The grades you expect set a target level. Courses at that level score highest, adjacent levels score less.
- How it is taught, up to 18 points. Exams, coursework, hands-on or earning while you learn, matched against the route.
- Distance, up to 12 points. Measured to the actual campus, not the head office, and it tails off rather than cutting cliff-edge.
- Practical checks, up to 10 points. Bonuses for a school or college setting and a confirmed age approval; a penalty where a fee is listed, because study programmes at 16 to 18 are funded.
Then the list is thinned out. Twenty colleges teach A level Biology, so we cap how many places any one provider, qualification or subject can take on the page. What you get is a shortlist, not a directory dump.
What it does not do
- It does not rank colleges by quality. We hold no inspection outcomes, no results data and no student satisfaction scores, so any ranking would be invented.
- It does not know about your local buses, your family, your part-time job or anything else that will actually decide this. Take the shortlist to someone who does.
- It does not take money from colleges, and no provider can pay to move up the list.
- It does not use a language model to write recommendations. Every reason shown is produced by the scoring above, which means it can be checked.
Who it is for
Year 11 students first. Then parents, who usually want the entry requirements and the travel in one place. Then careers advisers and teachers, who need to see the whole regional picture, including where provision is thin.
Being straight about the data
Providers maintain their own entries in the course directory, so some are immaculate and some are years out of date. Where we cannot confirm something, we say so rather than guessing. The data page sets out every source, every judgement we make on top of it and the known limitations.