Ofsted Reports Data Scraper

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Extract structured data from Ofsted full inspection PDF reports for children's homes — at scale. Judgement ratings, provider details, inspectors, home capacity, specialism, dates — 18 fields per report, parsed directly from the source PDFs. Export to your MySQL database, your Apify dataset, or both.

Built and maintained by Alkausari M.

✦ Highlights

• 📄 Full PDF parsing — 18 structured fields extracted from each report
• 📅 Date-filtered crawling — target only reports in your inspection date range
• 🗄 MySQL export — direct insert/update with ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, no duplicates on re-runs
• ♻️ Smart deduplication — startup checks your existing records and skips already-processed PDFs
• 🔗 Direct PDF URL support — pass a files.ofsted.gov.uk URL to process a single report
• 🛡 Resilient — auto-retry with exponential backoff; unparseable PDFs logged separately

⚙ How it works

1. Paste a search URL — from the Ofsted reports portal with your filters applied. Or pass a direct PDF URL.
2. Set a date range — latest_report_date_start and latest_report_date_end (YYYY-MM-DD).
3. Click Start — the Actor finds matching providers → Full Inspection reports → downloads and parses each PDF.

// Example input
{
 "start_urls": [
 { "url": "https://reports.ofsted.gov.uk/search?q=&level_1_types=3&level_2_types%5B0%5D=11&status%5B0%5D=1&start=0&rows=10" }
 ],
 "latest_report_date_start": "2026-02-15",
 "latest_report_date_end": "2026-02-28",
 "max_depth": 3,
 "skip_db_export": false,
 "db_host": "your-db-host",
 "db_database": "your-database-name",
 "db_user": "your-db-user",
 "db_password": "your-db-password"
}

Set skip_db_export: true to use the Actor without any database — all data still lands in your Apify dataset (JSON, CSV, Excel, API).

MySQL tables

When MySQL export is enabled, two tables are used:

• ofsted_reports — primary output, keyed on pdf_url. Records are inserted on first run, updated on re-runs.
• ofsted_unsupported_reports — PDFs that don't match the expected Ofsted format (e.g. older layouts) are logged here for review rather than silently dropped.

📦 What you get back

Each record represents one parsed inspection report:

{
"PDF URL":"https://files.ofsted.gov.uk/v1/file/50298941",
"Unique reference number":"2587763",
"Registered provider":"Mercia Children Services Ltd",
"Registered provider address":"Windsor House, Bayshill Road, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire GL50 3AT",
"Provision sub-type":"Children's home",
"Responsible individual":"Michael Lloyd",
"Registered manager":"David Griffiths",
"Inspection dates":"3 and 4 March 2026",
"Inspection type":"Full inspection",
"Overall experiences and progress":"good",
"Help and protection":"good",
"Leadership and management":"good",
"Date of last inspection":"25 February 2025",
"Overall judgement at last inspection":"good",
"Enforcement action since last inspection":"None",
"Inspectors":[
{"name":"Helen Fee","role":"Social Care Inspector"}
],
"Home Capacity":"4",
"Home Type":"social and emotional difficulties"
}

📋 Input

Direct PDF — single-report mode

{
 "start_urls": [{ "url": "https://files.ofsted.gov.uk/v1/file/50287454" }],
 "max_depth": 1,
 "skip_db_export": true
}

💡 Use cases

• Research — academic and policy analysis of inspection trends across providers and regions.
• Compliance monitoring — track ratings and enforcement actions across the providers you work with.
• Sector consultancy — build a structured dataset of children's-home judgements for client reporting.
• Scheduled syncs — set a rolling 7-day date window and schedule daily/weekly runs; dedup ensures no rework.
• Data products — power dashboards and BI on top of clean, parsed Ofsted data via the Apify API.

📮 Support

Bugs, feature requests, or custom scraping work — open an issue on Apify or email alkausarimujahid@gmail.com.