We built a school search that schools don't pay for.
School Path AI maps how UK pupils flow from primary to senior to university — using only public data, school-published sources, and a transparent methodology. No paywalls, no sponsored placements, no editorial “feel” rankings. Every number we surface is something you can trace back to its source.
UK schools advice is opaque, paywalled, or biased — pick two.
If you're a parent trying to plan a 14-year journey from reception to university, today you can: (a) read a different annual rankings list from every newspaper, each weighted by the editor's taste; (b) pay for the Good Schools Guide and hope their write-ups mention the school you care about; (c) hire a consultant whose incentives don't quite match yours; or (d) open Mumsnet at midnight and wonder why half the threads contradict the other half. The data exists — schools publish destinations, the DfE publishes performance tables, ISI publishes inspections — it is just not joined up, and certainly not honest about what it doesn't know.
One spreadsheet, one frustrated parent, then a database.
School Path AI started as a personal spreadsheet. Trying to understand how a London prep school's leavers actually ended up at university — not the headline “over 80% Russell Group” line but the real distribution — meant stitching together annual destinations PDFs from each prep, the senior school's own published outcomes, and UCAS data, then doing the chain-rule arithmetic by hand. The spreadsheet grew. So did the realisation that every other family making this decision would have to do the same work from scratch.
We rebuilt the spreadsheet as a database, added the law of total probability, made the methodology public, and — most importantly — built a quality-gating layer that refuses to print a percentage we cannot back. Where a senior school's data is too thin in our database, no number appears. The user sees the connection but not a misleading rate. That stance costs us “impressive” screenshots and gives us something more important: numbers we stand behind.
We are early. The product is improving every week as more schools' published sources are extracted and verified. If you spot a figure that looks wrong, please tell us — it is almost certainly fixable, and we would rather be corrected than guess.
What we believe
No school can buy placement on our rankings, our search results, or anywhere else. We do not run sponsored content. Our incentives belong to the families who pay for the product, full stop.
Every figure carries a confidence label and a clickable evidence URL. If we cannot show you where a number came from, we don't show you the number. Our quality gate hides probabilities derived from thin data — even when that hurts the demo.
The full prestige_score and pathway probability formulas live on the Methodology page. The repository is auditable. There is no proprietary 'editorial weighting' you have to take on faith.
GIAS, DfE Performance Tables, Ofsted, ISI, and each school's own published destinations page. We do not buy paywalled datasets — if a source isn't accessible to you, it isn't in our pipeline either.
The Recommend feature uses only entry stage, region, budget — never the child's name, address, school ID, or anything that could identify them. We do not collect special-category data and we do not sell to advertisers.
A 14% pathway means '14% of past leavers from this prep ended up at this university'. It is a statistical description, not a forecast for any individual child. We label this clearly and never inflate.
How we differ from what's out there
| School Path AI | Newspaper rankings | Paid guides | Education consultants | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open methodology | ✓ | Sometimes | ✗ | ✗ |
| Click-through to evidence | ✓ | ✗ | Limited | Verbal |
| Hides numbers when data is thin | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | — |
| No school payments | ✓ | Mixed | Yes | Mixed |
| Per-pathway probability (prep → senior → uni) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Verbal |
| Data freshness ≤ 12 months | Most rows | Annual | Annual | — |
| Costs | Subscription | Free + ads | £40/yr+ | £500–5k/case |
Who we are
School Path AI is built by a small team with backgrounds in data science, software engineering, and — directly relevant — navigating the UK independent schools system as parents. We're early-stage and scrappy on purpose: every line of code, every data row, and every editorial choice goes through the same hands. We'd rather be small and honest than big and beige.
We are not a journalistic publication. We are not a recruitment agency for any school. We are not affiliated with the Good Schools Guide, ISC, ISI, or DfE — we just use their public outputs (and credit them).
Want to talk? hello@schoolpath.ai. Press and partnerships: hello@schoolpath.ai. Data corrections: data@schoolpath.ai.
Try the pathway engine
Pick a prep school, see where its leavers actually go. Click any node to open its detail page. Numbers are hidden when our data isn't strong enough to back them.