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SID data API

Every English school, the people who work there, and a feed of what changed this week — available to your own systems or straight inside an AI assistant. Each email carries the colour rating and source you see on the site, so nothing is presented as more certain than it is.

Plans

Free allowance

Free

50 calls a day, free for every signed-in member.

1,550 calls a month

Standard

£99 / month

or £990 a year

School search, full profiles and named staff contacts for one sales team.

10,000 calls a month

Intelligence

£299 / month

or £2,990 a year

Everything in Standard plus the live changes feed: new heads, joins, departures, trust moves and vacancies.

50,000 calls a month

Changes feed included

Something bigger

Higher volumes, bulk exports or a licence for a data product — get in touch.

Keys are created and managed in your account.

Authentication

Send your key as a bearer token. It works from curl, Postman, server-side code and AI agents — no browser session or cookie is needed. Use the canonical host https://sid.school; requests to www.sid.school are redirected, so pass -L if you use it. Responses include the calls used and remaining.

# 1. find the school and read its URN
curl "https://sid.school/api/public/v1/schools?q=Grey%20Court" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
# -> { "total": 1, "results": [ { "urn": 138825, "name": "Grey Court School", ... } ] }

# 2. full profile
curl "https://sid.school/api/public/v1/schools/138825" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

# 3. staff contacts, confirmed addresses only
curl "https://sid.school/api/public/v1/schools/138825/contacts?min_confidence=green" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

# 4. what changed since a date
curl "https://sid.school/api/public/v1/changes?since=2026-09-01&limit=50" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

# liveness, no key required
curl https://sid.school/api/public/v1/health
# -> { "status": "ok", "api_version": "v1" }

Use SID inside ChatGPT or Claude

SID speaks MCP, so an AI assistant can search schools, read a profile, pull staff contacts and follow the changes feed as built-in tools. There is no key to paste — you sign in with your SID account and approve the connection once.

Server address

https://sid.school/mcp

  1. ChatGPT — Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, name it SID, paste the address above, then sign in with your SID account when prompted. Available on Plus, Pro, Team and Enterprise.
  2. Claude — Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, paste the same address and approve the sign-in.
  3. Cursor, Codex and similar — add an MCP server of type http pointing at the same address.

Tools offered: search_schools, get_school, get_school_contacts and list_changes. Ordinary ChatGPT web browsing cannot use your API key, so this connector — or a custom GPT Action — is the way to let an assistant reach SID.

Fair use limits

SID is licensed for ordinary sales use, not bulk export. Alongside your monthly allowance every key is held to a short-term burst limit of 120 calls a minute and a daily ceiling of a tenth of the monthly allowance. A staff contacts request counts as five calls, and a school search counts one call for every 25 results returned. When a limit is hit you receive a 429 with a Retry-After header. Responses carry X-SID-Remaining and X-SID-Daily-Remaining so you can pace yourself.

Endpoints

GET/api/public/v1/changes

What changed at UK schools since a date: new heads, joins, departures, role changes, trust moves, openings, closures, new vacancies and newly found contacts.

since
— date, e.g. 2026-09-01
until
— date
types
— comma-separated event types
urn
— limit to one school
trust
— limit to a multi-academy trust
limit / offset
— paging, up to 200 per page

GET/api/public/v1/schools

Search and filter the school directory.

q
— name contains
postcode / town
— location
local_authority / region
— area
phase / type / gender
— school kind
ofsted
— Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement, Inadequate
trust
— multi-academy trust name
religious_character
— faith
has_sixth_form
— true or false
min_pupils / max_pupils
— size
limit / offset
— paging, up to 100 per page

GET/api/public/v1/schools/{urn}

Full profile: address, phase, trust, pupils, Ofsted rating and report, pupil and workforce census, and open vacancies.

GET/api/public/v1/schools/{urn}/contacts

Staff with roles, phones and emails. Every email carries a colour rating and the page it came from.

min_confidence
— green, amber or red — leave out weaker addresses
include_shared
— false to skip general office inboxes

GET/api/public/v1/health

Liveness check. No API key required; returns only a status and the API version.

Email confidence

  • green — published by the school or verified as deliverable.
  • amber — built from a format the school demonstrably uses.
  • red — a best guess. Treat with care and expect bounces.

Fair and lawful use

  • These are named people at their workplace. You need your own lawful basis for contacting them, and you must honour opt-outs.
  • Anyone who asks SID to withhold their details is removed from API responses as well as the site, so re-check contacts rather than caching them indefinitely.
  • Use the data inside your own business. Reselling or redistributing it is not permitted.
  • Do not send to red addresses at volume — it damages your sending domain and ours.