We combined data from the Office for Standards in Education with those from a large national survey of child and adolescent mental health and developed a simple score that schools or LEAs could use to predict the level of emotional and behavioural difficulties that they are likely to encounter. The final Ford score is based on the rates of free school meals, exclusions, unauthorized absence and children with special educational needs. These data are collected routinely, so the Ford score could easily be calculated to provide estimates of the level of emotional and behavioural problems in mainstream schools without the use of additional resources. It needs further reliability and validity testing but could provide a means of allocating resources.