Cookies

This website puts small files (known as ‘cookies’) onto your computer to collect information about how you browse the site.

Cookies are used to:

  • measure how you use the website so it can be updated and improved based on your needs
  • remember the notifications you’ve seen so that we don’t show them to you again.

The cookies from this website aren’t used to identify you personally.

You’ll normally see a message on the site before we store a cookie on your computer.

Find out more about how to manage cookies.

How we use cookies

Measuring website usage (Google Analytics)

We use Google Analytics software to collect information about how you use this site. We do this to help make sure the site is meeting the needs of its users and to help us make improvements to our services in the future.

Google Analytics stores information about:

  • the pages you visit on this website
  • how long you spend on each of our pages
  • how you got to this website
  • what you click on while you’re visiting this website.

We don’t collect or store your personal information (for example your name or address), so this information can’t be used to identify who you are.

We don’t allow Google to use or share our analytics data.

Google Analytics sets the following cookies:

Universal Analytics (Google)
Name Purpose Expires
_ga This helps us count how many people visit this website by tracking if you’ve visited before 2 years
_gid This helps us count how many people visit this website by tracking if you’ve visited before 24 hours
_gat Used to manage the rate at which page view requests are made 10 minutes

Government services

Most services we link to are run by different government departments. These services may set additional cookies and, if so, will have their own cookies policy.

Cookie notice

Essential and performance cookies to ensure a safe journey through the site have been implemented.

Name Purpose Expires
ARRAffinity and ARRAffinitySameSite Windows Azure Web Sites, by default, use an ARRAffinity cookie to ensure subsequent requests from a user are routed back to the web site instance that the user initially connected to. In other words, Windows Azure Web Sites assumes that a web site is not stateless. We don't use this cookie for any other purpose than to serve you the correct content. Session
.AspNetCore.Session and antiForgery Microsoft based cookies that help us control the session and prevent security issues for this website. Session

In addition we save cookies that let us know that you have dismissed the cookie notice so that it doesn’t show again the next time you visit the website and show whether you have accepted analytics cookie usage.

Name Purpose Expires
bannerDismissed Saves a message to let us know you’ve seen and dismissed the cookie notice Session
gaEnabled Saves a message to let us know whether you have accepted or rejected analytics functionality Session

Cookies from other websites

During your visit to this website, you may notice some cookies that are not related to the Ofsted website. This happens when you visit a page with content embedded from a third party (for example YouTube videos) or use links to other sites. These websites may place cookies on your computer.

Ofsted does not control how a third party uses their cookies. If you are concerned about this, you should check the third-party websites' privacy policies for more information about their cookies.