About Schools AU
Schools AU is an independent guide to Australian schools. It exists because the official sources are scattered across nine departments and authorities, most of them hard to search and impossible to compare. We put them on one page per school and say plainly what each number can and cannot tell you.
Who
Schools AU is published by Consultin AI, an Australian company. It is not affiliated with ACARA, any education department or any school. Nothing here is paid for by a school. If that changes, it will say so on the page.
Where the data comes from
School lists, locations, enrolments and contact details are taken from each state and territory's open-data portal under Creative Commons licences. NSW also publishes ICSEA, language-background and selective flags in its open dataset. Senior results come from the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, the WA School Curriculum and Standards Authority and NESA's published HSC merit lists. The data sources page lists every dataset with its licence and the fields we use.
We currently cover 6,792 government schools and are adding non-government schools state by state.
How the bands and rankings work
Where a state publishes school-level senior results, we order schools on that state's own headline figure: the median VCE study score in Victoria, and the SCSA achievement measure in Western Australia. Schools are then split into three equal bands (A, B, C), each with three sub-bands, by position in that list. The band is a position, not a grade, and it only compares schools that have published results in the same state and level.
In New South Wales the Education Act 1990 (section 18A) prohibits ranking schools by results, so we publish only what the Act allows: a list of the top 10% of schools by HSC top-band results, drawn from NESA's merit lists, and each school's own count on its own page. No other NSW rank, percentile or comparison is shown or calculated.
We do not blend measures into a composite score. Different tests measure different cohorts, and a single score hides more than it shows.
Why ICSEA is next to every result
The Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage summarises parents' occupation and education, remoteness and Indigenous enrolment. A school at 1100 draws from very different families than one at 900, and results follow that gap closely. Comparing a school with others of similar ICSEA is the only fair way to read a raw score, so every profile lists similar-ICSEA schools where the data allows.
Small cohorts
A school with 20 students in a year level can move a long way on one strong or weak cohort. We show the figures anyway, because hiding them helps nobody, but we flag them and encourage you to look at several years before drawing conclusions.
Disclaimer
Figures are reproduced from published datasets and can lag the school by a year or more. Enrolment rules, catchment boundaries, fees and programs change. Confirm anything that matters with the school or the relevant department before acting on it. Schools AU accepts no liability for decisions made on the basis of this site.
Corrections: info@consultin.ai. Schools may request a correction to any factual field; we check it against the source and update within the next build.