How to get CSV data
In this guide, you’ll learn how to get CSV data from the explore education statistics (EES) API. This may be particularly useful if you wish to access data sets in their entirety, or find it more comfortable to work with CSVs.
What you’ll need
You should already be familiar with the EES API. If not, you should read the Quick start first as this guide will presume some prior knowledge.
To run request examples in this guide, it is a good idea to come prepared with a HTTP or API client tool. Good recommendations for beginners are Postman or Insomnia.
Some prior knowledge of working with your chosen HTTP client will be necessary to work with the examples.
Get an entire data set as a CSV file
Every data set is created from an underlying CSV file that contains all the data. You may find it useful (or necessary) to work with the underlying CSV instead of interacting with the data set via the API.
The underlying CSV file can be downloaded via the Download data set CSV
endpoint. To use this endpoint, you need to make a GET request:
GET https://dev.statistics.api.education.gov.uk/api/v1/data-sets/{dataSetId}/csv
In the request URL, you’d substitute the {dataSetId} parameter with your chosen data set’s ID.
Upon making this request, a download containing the CSV data should start. The file will be gzip compressed (like most of the API responses), meaning that your HTTP client will need to support gzip decompression to extract the contents.
It should be noted that the CSV data will be use human-readable labels for its contents instead of machine-readable identifiers. This means that unlike the rest of the API, there are no backward compatibility guarantees between different versions of the data set.