Ofsted Children's Home Inspection Reports Scraper

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.

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✦ 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

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⚙ 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,
    "enable_db_export": true,
    "db_host": "your-db-host",
    "db_database": "your-database-name",
    "db_user": "your-db-user",
    "db_password": "your-db-password"
}

By default, MySQL export is disabled — all data lands in your Apify dataset (JSON, CSV, Excel, API) without any database configuration required.

MySQL tables

When enable_db_export is on, two tables are created automatically on first run:

• 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.

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📦 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"
}

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📋 Input

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
start_urls	Array	Yes	—	Ofsted search URL(s) or a direct files.ofsted.gov.uk PDF URL
latest_report_date_start	String	Yes	Today	Start of inspection date range (YYYY-MM-DD)
latest_report_date_end	String	Yes	Today	End of inspection date range (YYYY-MM-DD)
only_latest_inspection	Boolean	No	true	Returns only the latest inspection per URN. Disable to extract all historical reports.
include_unsupported	Boolean	No	false	Include unsupported inspection types in results for later processing.
max_depth	Integer	No	3	Keep it always 3. Set to 1 only when passing direct PDF URLs.
enable_db_export	Boolean	No	false	Enable MySQL export. When on, records are inserted into your database in addition to the Apify dataset.
rescrape	Boolean	No	false	Re-process already-scraped PDFs. Normally PDFs already in the database are skipped — enable this to backfill new fields. Existing rows are updated, not duplicated.
db_host	String	If DB export	—	MySQL server hostname or IP address.
db_database	String	If DB export	—	Name of the MySQL database to connect to.
db_user	String	If DB export	—	MySQL username.
db_password	String	If DB export	—	MySQL password.

Direct PDF — single-report mode

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

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💡 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.

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📮 Support

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

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