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DfE’s school financial returns are open data: there is no account and no API key. You switch the integration on once at the MSP level, so your agents can read it.

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1. Switch it on in Neo

1

Open Integrations

Open Integrations → DfE Financial Benchmarking and Insights in the Neo Dashboard. The card is under Other.
2

Save

Choose Enabled under Access and click Save. Neo reads DfE’s list of returns once before it saves, to check that it answers.

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2. Store each school’s URN

The URN is DfE’s six-digit school number. You can look one up on Get Information about Schools. Store it on each school client in your PSA, for example in a custom field, or list the schools and their URNs in the agent’s instructions.

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3. Set up the yearly agent

Set up a scheduled agent that runs once a year, or once a month if you want new figures soon after DfE publishes them; it writes only when a figure changed: a new year, or a correction DfE made to a published year. Open it from Agents, go to its Tools & Settings tab, click Other, and set the DfE Financial Benchmarking and Insights block’s Financial Returns to Read Only. Give it your PSA’s group for the client record at Read / Write: on Halo, Companies. In its instructions, name the fields to write, such as IT support (E20G), total ICT spending, the financial year and the return, and where the agent finds each school’s URN. Say what to write for an academy, which has no IT support line: leave it empty, or write its ICT learning resources figure. The agent lists in its summary every school it could not update, with the reason. See DfE Financial Benchmarking API for what the agent reads.