About
School data, organised so you can actually read it.
Australia publishes a great deal of school information, and almost all of it arrives as spreadsheets. The figures are there, but answering a simple question — how big is this school, what is its year range, what does the community around it look like — means downloading a file, finding the right column, and knowing what the column means.
Schools.ink takes those public releases and turns them into a page per school, a page per suburb and a page per state, so the answer is a link away instead of a spreadsheet away.
Coverage
What is in the directory
The directory covers every school in the current Australian public data release.
9,755
School profiles
4,611
Suburbs covered
8
States & territories
4.2M
Students represented
Standards
How we handle the data
These rules decide what gets published and how it is presented.
Official sources only
Every figure originates in a public data release from a national education authority. Nothing on this site is user-submitted, crowd-sourced, estimated or inferred, and we do not accept paid placement in listings or rankings.
Missing means missing
Where a value is not reported in the source release, the profile says 'Not available'. It is never rendered as a zero, a dash or a blank cell, because a missing figure that looks like a real one is worse than no figure at all.
Traceable and attributed
Source datasets are named on the pages that use them and attributed under CC BY 4.0, so any number you see here can be traced back to the original public release and checked.
Method
How a school profile is built
Raw fields are normalised, validated and linked together before a page is built. Nothing is rewritten or adjusted along the way.
- 1
Ingest the release
School profile and school location datasets are loaded from the official public release for the current reporting year.
- 2
Normalise the fields
Numeric fields are parsed and validated, text fields are cleaned, and anything unreported is marked as missing rather than defaulted.
- 3
Join and relate
Each campus is linked to its suburb, local government area and statistical areas, which is what makes nearby and similar school comparisons possible.
- 4
Publish as pages
Every school, suburb and state is rendered as a static page with its own summary, breakdowns and source note.
Glossary
How to read the numbers
Education data uses a lot of specialist terms. Here is what each one means on this site, and what it does not mean.
- Enrolment
- The total number of students recorded at the school in the source release, with the girls and boys split shown where those fields are reported. Enrolment is a point-in-time count, so it will not match a school's own figure taken on a different date.
- ICSEA
- The Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, a measure of the socio-educational background of a school's student community. It is set around a mean of 1000. ICSEA describes the community a school draws from, not the quality of its teaching, and should never be read as a school ranking.
- ICSEA percentile
- Where the school's ICSEA value sits relative to other schools in the dataset, from 1 to 100. It is a positional measure only, and carries the same caveat as ICSEA itself.
- Socio-educational quarters
- The share of a school's students falling into each quarter of the national socio-educational distribution, from the bottom quarter to the top. The four figures describe the spread within a school community.
- Student-teacher ratio
- Total enrolments divided by full-time equivalent teaching staff. It is a whole-school average and does not describe the size of any particular class.
- Sector and school type
- Sector is Government, Catholic or Independent. School type is Primary, Secondary, Combined or Special, following the classification used in the source data.
- Year range
- The span of year levels the school reports offering, expressed in the notation used by its own state or territory, such as K-6, P-12 or T-10.
- Location fields
- Suburb, postcode, state, local government area, statistical area levels and remoteness classification, taken from the official school location release.
Limits
What this site is not
Schools.ink is a reference directory, not a league table. We do not rank schools, score them, or publish opinions about which school is better than another — the public data does not support those judgements, and presenting it as if it did would be misleading.
A school profile also cannot tell you about teaching quality, culture, pastoral care, specialist programmes or whether a school suits a particular child. Those things do not appear in any dataset. Treat what you find here as the starting point for a shortlist, then visit the schools, talk to the staff, and check current details with the school or your state education department before making a decision.
Licensing
Sources and reuse
Source data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence and attributed on the pages that use it.
Profiles are built from the Australian school profile and school location datasets for the current reporting year, published by national education authorities. Each profile and suburb page names the release it draws on, and the footer carries the licence attribution sitewide.
Datasets are refreshed when a new official release is published, which means figures reflect the most recent reporting year rather than today. If you spot something that looks wrong, a correction request is the fastest way to get it looked at.
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