Where the data comes from

The sources

• National Careers Service course directory

  Published monthly by the Department for Education. Every live course offered by a publicly funded provider in England, with venues, start dates, costs, entry requirements and the provider's own description. Download it here.

• Learning Aim Reference Service

  The qualification register. The course directory leaves level, subject area, qualification type and awarding organisation blank, so we recover all four by matching each course to its learning aim reference. It also carries the Section 96 approvals, which say whether a qualification may be taught to 16 to 18 year olds. Find a learning aim.

• postcodes.io

  Turns venue postcodes into coordinates, local authorities and regions, using Ordnance Survey and ONS data.

All three are available under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

What we add

• Plain-English subjects. The funding data files courses under headings like "Service Enterprises", which covers both hairdressing and floristry, and puts psychology under science. We reclassify every course using its subject area and its title together, into 26 subjects a sixteen-year-old would recognise.
• Routes. A levels, T Levels, applied and BTEC, vocational and trade, apprenticeships, stepping stones. Taken from the register's own qualification type, because course titles are marketing copy.
• A school-leaver test. A course counts as open to 16 to 18 year olds when the register approves the qualification under Section 96. Where the register is silent, it only counts if a school or college runs it full time at Level 3 or below. Without that second test, a sixteen-year-old's results filled up with adult evening classes.
• A short-course test. A two-year full-time diploma and a twenty-five hour electrical regulations update can share the same approved qualification. We estimate the learning hours behind each listing and treat anything under roughly 250 hours, unless it is full time, as a short course. Those are hidden from the default view and a filter brings them back.
• Tidier titles. Providers type titles by hand, so they arrive with leading asterisks, internal sort codes and abbreviated levels. We strip the noise and expand "L3" to "Level 3".

Limitations worth knowing

• Providers maintain their own listings. Some update monthly, some have not touched theirs in years. Course pages we link to sometimes 404.
• Around 4% of courses carry no valid learning aim reference, so we read the level from the title instead and the subject may be less precise.
• Some providers attach the wrong learning aim reference to a course, which can put a plumbing diploma in the A level bucket. It affects well under 1% of courses.
• Roughly 8% of course runs have no venue postcode, so they cannot appear in a distance search even though they are real.
• The directory covers England only, and only publicly funded provision. Independent schools and private colleges that take no public funding are not in it.
• Apprenticeship vacancies are a separate service and are barely represented here. For those, use Find an apprenticeship.
• We hold no inspection judgements, results or destinations data, so nothing here says whether a college is any good. That is a deliberate gap, not an oversight.

How often it refreshes

The course directory is republished monthly and we rebuild from the newest release. The qualification register updates more often; we take it at the same time. This build was generated on 2026-08-28.