Most scraping projects start by finding a website to scrape. This one started from the opposite direction: I knew the data existed as official government downloads, and my job was to make it accessible via a clean API.
The data source
Ofsted (the UK school inspections body) publishes monthly management information as CSV files on GOV.UK. The file covers all 22,000+ state-funded schools in England with their latest inspection grades, local authority, postcode, phase, and size data. It's 16 MB, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 — explicitly permitting commercial use.
No scraping needed. No authentication. Just a CSV download and some parsing logic.
The architecture
