About Us
SchoolAtlas is a free, independent reference for families choosing a public school in Australia. It began with a simple frustration: the facts about a school are all published somewhere, but they are scattered across department registers, national datasets, PDF fact sheets and the schools' own websites. A parent who just wants to know which years a school teaches, where its intake zone runs, how many students attend and what support classes it offers should not have to assemble that picture from a dozen tabs. SchoolAtlas assembles it for them, on one page per school.
The second frustration was language. Almost all of this material exists in English only, which leaves many families in NSW reading a school's most important details in their second or third language, or relying on a child to interpret for them. Choosing a school is hard enough without that barrier. So SchoolAtlas is published in English, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, with the school descriptions themselves translated, not just the buttons and menus. School names and street addresses are deliberately left in English so you can match them to a map, an enrolment form, or a conversation at the school office.
What we believe
We never rank schools. There is no "best school" that is best for every child. A ranking column would invite exactly the comparison we think is unhelpful, so our data model has no score, no grade and no league table, and it never will. What we show instead is context: the size of the school, the community it serves, the years it covers, the specialties and support it provides, and how those figures have moved over time.
We publish facts, not opinions. Every figure on this site comes from an official source and is tied to a dated retrieval, so you can see when it was collected and follow it back to the publisher. We do not host parent reviews or star ratings. Descriptive text about a school is organised from that school's own published material and from NSW School Infrastructure pages, and is written to describe rather than to sell.
Numbers are a starting point, not a verdict. Figures such as enrolment, FTE and ICSEA describe a school's scale and community — nothing more. Our Glossary explains what each one means and how to read it sensibly. The parts that matter most to your child are still best learned from a visit, a conversation with the principal, and the walk to the school gate.
Where the data comes from
Our current coverage is NSW government schools, built from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) national datasets and the NSW Department of Education's open data, including the school master register, intake catchments, attendance, enrolment history and the support-class register. The Sources page lists each dataset, its publisher, its licence and when we last retrieved it. The design is deliberately national in shape, so other states and territories can be added as their data allows.
Who we are
We are a small team of parents in NSW. Our own children are in local primary and high schools right now, so the questions this site answers are the ones we have been asking ourselves at kitchen tables and school gates. SchoolAtlas is the tool we wanted and could not find.
We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for any school, the NSW Department of Education, or any other government body. The site is free to use. We may carry sponsored content in future to help cover our costs; if we do, it will be clearly labelled as such, it will sit apart from the factual data, and no payment will ever change a school's figures, its description, or where it appears in a list of results.
Accuracy
We do our best to get this right. Every figure is reconciled from official data, checked against the source it came from, and stamped with the date we retrieved it. Even so, we cannot guarantee that everything on this site is complete, current or correct: source datasets are revised and republished, schools change, and our own processing can go wrong. Nothing here is official advice. Before you act on something that matters, such as an enrolment decision, a catchment boundary or a support placement, please confirm it with the school or the Department directly.
Contact and corrections
If something is wrong, out of date, or missing, we want to hear about it, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it there. Tell us which school and which figure, and we will check it against the source and fix it. Questions and suggestions are just as welcome.
Email: info@schoolatlas.com.au