The Department for Education has kindly provided CSV files containing school-level data on ethnicity of pupils at state-funded primary and secondary schools in England from 2006/07 to 2022/23, in response to my FOI request.
You can download the CSV files and related correspondence:
FOI 2024-0002737.zip (12 MB zipped)
The files contain the URN identifier for each school, along with counts and percentages for the ethnicity of pupils at the school in each academic year. The ethnic groups are the same as those used by ONS for Census purposes (except that "Other ethnic group: Arab" has not been coded separately).
If you want to analyse or map this data, you can use the URNs to link the data to other school information available from DfE's Get Information about Schools service (formerly known as EduBase).
The CSV files were prepared by DfE following a Parliamentary Question tabled last month by Neil O'Brien, MP for Harborough.
DfE points out that all the data in the files was already published as part of the department's Schools, Pupils and their Characteristics publication. The PQ was treated as a request to compile the data into a more readily accessible form.
DfE has confirmed the information in the files may be re-used as open data under the terms of the Open Government Licence.
Neil O'Brien MP has written a blog post on migration and ethnicity, with charts and maps based on the DfE schools data. This includes some basic calculations of difference in the ethnicity breakdowns between 2006/07 and 2022/23:
Overall, the change is very dramatic over quite a short period. The proportion of schools where white British pupils are a minority increased from 12% to 23% over the period. The number of schools where white British pupils accounted for less than one in twenty pupils rose from 421 to 872.
Those calculations are correct, though whether you attach any great meaning to them is likely to depend on your politics.