School census is one of the fundamental building blocks of an LAs data set in Nexus. All attainment results are matched to school census to contextualise the analysis and it is this combination that makes Nexus so powerful. This article covers the process of importing the school census.
If you are going to use Nexus, you need to be importing the school census.
Who this is for
Children's data teams responsible for importing education data into the Nexus system
Before you start
Importing the school census requires permissions to import pupil data through Keypas.
Short video
A short introductory video is available below to take you through the process.
Census - Key facts
There are 3 school census collections each year. These occur in October, January and May; the censuses are also commonly known as Autumn, Spring and Summer respectively. Once collected and submitted to the Department, the census files can be downloaded from the DfE's COLLECT portal and are provided in the xml file format.
COLLECT will close a couple of months after the census date at which point an LA can download files for all schools, including academies in their local area. (You will have access to maintained schools' data as soon as the files have been submitted, and to academies' data once DfE are happy that any queries or errors have been resolved and have authorised them).
We strongly recommend that you always import your census data as soon as you have the full set of files available for that term's census, as this powers the absence and exclusions elements of Insight but it is essential to get the most from Nexus that you import the spring term census as this is required for populating the pupil characteristics fields in the primary assessment reports and assessment elements of Insight.
Importing the census
Census files can be downloaded from the DfE's COLLECT portal as individual XML files for each school in your LA. This includes academy data once they have been authorised by DfE. You will need to separately download the academy files ("Academy export") and maintained school files ("Export all"), which will give you two ZIP files. Those files can be imported directly into Nexus.
- Log into Nexus and browse to the import wizard
- Keypas > Imports > Import New File > School Census
- At the bottom of the import screen you can either drag and drop your ZIP files or add related files to select them from your computer.
- When you have added the files, click Upload and this will start to check that the files themselves are valid.
- If all the files are OK then you can confirm the upload, and you will be taken back to the import queue, where you can check that it has loaded correctly.
Common problems
Because the files come directly from COLLECT, there shouldn't be too many problems with them, but sometimes errors can come up. If the entire import fails then you may need to split it into smaller batches to identify which file is causing it to fail.
One of the more common problems is to have special characters that haven't been encoded correctly, particularly ampersands – any '&' in a field (eg school name, address) should be written as & – you can open the offending XML file in Notepad, search for '&' and see if there are any that are not encoded correctly. If so, use a text editor to fix them, save and re-upload the file.
You should also ensure that the file type suffix for any file is .XML Any other suffix can be changed to .XML by simply renaming the file (though this cannot be done inside a zip file)
If you are unable to resolve the problem then please contact the helpdesk at nexussupport@angelsolutions.co.uk and they will advise you what to do next.
You can find more advice on checking and preparing import files - generally - in the Preparing your files to import article.
Last reviewed / owner:
Last reviewed - August 2026 / owner - Technical Support Director