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Glossary

School pages on SchoolAtlas show a handful of figures, labels and abbreviations drawn from official sources. They describe the community a school serves, the scale at which it operates and the kind of school it is — they are not marks, rankings, or a verdict on how good a school is. SchoolAtlas never ranks schools. The notes below explain what each term means and, just as importantly, how to read it sensibly.

A single number rarely tells you whether a school suits your child. Use these figures as context for the rest of what you learn — a visit, a conversation with the principal, the programs on offer, and the journey to the gate.

On this page

Understanding the Numbers

FTE — Full-Time Equivalent

What it is. A way of counting students or staff that accounts for part-time participation. One person enrolled or employed full time counts as 1.0; someone there half the week counts as 0.5.

How it is measured. Each person's enrolled or working hours are expressed as a fraction of a full load, and the fractions are added up. This is why you may see a figure like "212.4 students" or "18.6 teaching staff" — it is not an error, just the part-time fractions adding together.

How to read it. FTE lets you compare schools fairly regardless of how many people attend part time. It is most useful for getting a sense of a school's size and for comparing the ratio of students to teaching staff. A small FTE simply means a smaller school, which may suit some children and not others — it says nothing about quality. The NSW Department of Education reports enrolments as FTE; ACARA reports a headcount, so the two figures for the same school rarely match exactly.

Headcount

What it is. The number of individual students enrolled, each counted as one whether they attend full or part time. It is the figure ACARA publishes on My School and the one used in the year-by-year enrolment table on each school page.

How to read it. Headcount is the more intuitive "how many children go here" number; FTE is the fairer basis for comparing staffing. When the two disagree for a school, the gap is the part-time enrolment — common in the earliest years and in SSPs — not an error.

ICSEA — Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage

What it is. A national scale, created by ACARA, that summarises the socio-educational background of a school's students — chiefly their parents' education and occupation, along with the school's geographic location and the proportion of Indigenous students.

How it is measured. ICSEA is set so that the national average sits at 1000, with most schools falling roughly between 800 and 1200. A higher number means the student body, on average, comes from a more educationally advantaged background; a lower number, a less advantaged one.

How to read it. ICSEA describes the community, not the school. A higher ICSEA does not mean a better school, and a lower one does not mean a worse school — it reflects the circumstances families bring with them, not the teaching inside. Its real value is as context: it helps you read other figures (such as attendance or assessment results) in light of the community a school serves, rather than comparing very different communities as though they were the same.

SEA quarters — Socio-Educational Advantage

What it is. A breakdown showing how a school's students are spread across the four national quarters of socio-educational advantage. It is the same underlying measure as ICSEA — based on parents' occupation and education — but shown as a distribution rather than a single number.

How it is measured. Every student in Australia is placed in one of four equal quarters, from the bottom (least advantaged) quarter to the top (most advantaged) quarter. The four percentages show what share of this school's students fall in each quarter. In a school that mirrors the nation exactly, each figure would be about 25%.

How to read it. The spread tells you how mixed or concentrated a school's community is. A school weighted towards the bottom quarters serves a less advantaged community; one weighted towards the top, a more advantaged community. As with ICSEA, this describes who attends, not how well the school teaches — it is context, not a score.

FOEI — Family Occupation and Education Index

What it is. The NSW government's own measure of a school community's socio-economic background, used by the NSW Department of Education. It plays a similar role to ICSEA but is calculated and scaled differently.

How it is measured. FOEI is scaled so the NSW state average is 100. Importantly, it runs in the opposite direction to ICSEA: a higher FOEI indicates a greater concentration of disadvantage in the school community, while a lower FOEI indicates relative advantage.

How to read it. Because FOEI and ICSEA move in opposite directions, never compare their raw numbers side by side — a school can have an above-average ICSEA and an above-average FOEI at the same time. Read FOEI on its own terms: it is the NSW lens on the same idea, describing the community a school serves rather than its quality.

LBOTE — Language Background Other Than English

What it is. The percentage of students who, or whose parents/guardians, speak a language other than English at home.

How it is measured. It is reported as a share of the school's enrolment. The label covers a very wide range — from students fully fluent in English who simply speak another language at home, to recent arrivals still learning English.

How to read it. LBOTE is a measure of linguistic and cultural diversity, not of English proficiency or of academic outcomes. A high LBOTE figure does not mean students struggle with English, and it says nothing about a school's quality. For many families a diverse community is itself something they are looking for; for others it is simply background information. Either way, treat it as a description of the community, not a judgement of the school.

Attendance rate

What it is. The share of possible school days that students actually attended, averaged across the school. It is published by the NSW Department of Education for students in Years 1 to 10.

How it is measured. The days students were present are divided by the days they were expected to attend over the reporting period, and the result is expressed as a percentage. Absences of every kind — illness, holidays taken in term, unexplained — count against it equally.

How to read it. Attendance is heavily shaped by things outside the school's control: the local health picture, family travel, distance and transport, and the age mix (younger children are absent more often). Read a school's figure against its own history and against schools serving a similar community, not as a league table. A drop in one year is usually a story about that year, not about the school.

Remoteness

What it is. A classification of where a school is, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS): Major Cities, Inner Regional, Outer Regional, Remote and Very Remote.

How it is measured. The ABS scores every location by road distance to towns and cities of different sizes, then groups the scores into the five bands. A school takes the band of the place it sits in.

How to read it. Remoteness is context for almost every other figure — it drives travel time, the size of the school, the depth of subject choice at senior level and how attendance behaves. It also feeds into ICSEA. It is a description of geography, not of quality.

Kinds of School

Public / government school

Every school on SchoolAtlas is a NSW government school (also called a public school): owned and run by the NSW Department of Education, free to attend, and open to every child living in its catchment. Independent and Catholic schools are not included, so a comparison across those sectors is never being made.

Infants school

A primary school that enrols only the youngest years — Kindergarten to Year 2. Children move to a neighbouring primary school for Year 3. See the Kindergarten and Year 3 listings.

Central school

A single school teaching Kindergarten right through to Year 12 on one site, found in rural and remote NSW where separate primary and high schools would each be very small. Central schools appear in both the primary and secondary year listings.

College and campus

In some areas several government high schools operate together as a college — typically one or more junior campuses (Years 7 to 10) feeding a senior campus (Years 11 and 12). Each campus is listed on SchoolAtlas as its own school because each has its own site, staff and figures; the college name appears in the school name (for example "Chifley College Shalvey Campus"). See the Year 11 listing for senior campuses.

Selective and partially selective

Selective high schools enrol academically gifted students in Years 7 to 12 on the basis of the Selective High School Placement Test, sat in Year 6, rather than by catchment. A partially selective high school runs some selective classes alongside its ordinary local enrolment. Neither label says anything about the quality of teaching in a non-selective school; it describes the admission rule. Search for them with the selective filter, and read the NSW Department of Education's guide to selective high schools.

Opportunity class (OC)

A Years 5 and 6 class for academically gifted primary students, hosted by a limited number of primary schools. Entry is through the Opportunity Class Placement Test, sat in Year 4, and the class draws children from well beyond the host school's catchment. A school with an OC is otherwise an ordinary local primary school. Search for them with the opportunity-class filter.

Support class

A small class inside a mainstream school for students with disability or additional learning needs, taught by a specialist teacher, with a focus such as autism, intellectual disability, hearing or vision. Placement is by application through the Department, not by catchment. SchoolAtlas lists schools by the focus of the support classes they run — see support classes. The Department's inclusive learning support pages explain the process.

School for Specific Purposes (SSP)

A whole school dedicated to a specialist setting rather than a class within a mainstream one: schools for students with moderate to high support needs, behaviour or mental-health programs, hospital schools, schools in youth-justice centres, distance-education schools, and a few residential or rural health programs. Placement is by referral. Because they serve a specific purpose, their figures — size, attendance, year mix — cannot be compared with a neighbourhood school's. See schools for specific purposes.

Intensive English Centre (IEC)

A unit attached to a government high school (or, in one case, a whole high school) that teaches newly arrived students intensive English before they move into ordinary classes. IECs are one reason a school's LBOTE share can be high. Schools that host one are listed under intensive English.

Distance education

Schools that teach students who cannot attend in person — because of isolation, travel, illness or other circumstances — by correspondence and online. Their enrolments are geographically scattered, so a distance-education school has no catchment and its location tells you little. See distance education.

Environmental Education Centre (EEC)

A Department field-study centre — usually in a national park, bushland or on the coast — that hosts excursions and programs for classes from other schools. Children are not enrolled at an EEC; they visit for a day or a camp. EECs appear on SchoolAtlas because they are gazetted government schools, but their figures are not comparable with an enrolling school's.

Getting a Place

Catchment / intake area

What it is. The area around a government school within which every child is guaranteed a place at that school. The Department calls it the intake area; parents usually say catchment or zone. Some schools have separate boundaries for different year levels or a boundary that changes from a given year.

How to read it. Living inside a catchment is the surest route to enrolment. Boundaries are redrawn from time to time as suburbs grow, so check the current map before relying on it. Use the map to view catchments and to find, by address, whose intake area a home falls in. The Department's own school finder is the authoritative source.

Out-of-area enrolment

Applying to a school outside your catchment. Schools may accept out-of-area students when they have room after local enrolments; each school sets its own criteria within Department policy, and many popular schools accept none. See our guide to access requests and the Department's enrolment page.

Year levels

NSW schooling runs from Kindergarten (the first year of school, age 5 to 6) through Years 1 to 6 in primary school and Years 7 to 12 in high school. Some schools also run a pre-school. Each school page lists the years it teaches; the year listings (Kindergarten, Year 7 and so on) show every school offering a given year.

Identifiers

AGE ID

The national identifier ACARA assigns to every Australian school, used on My School. SchoolAtlas uses it as the stable key in every school URL (/schools/12345-school-name), so a school's page keeps its address even if it is renamed.

Official sources

The definitions above paraphrase these publishers; their pages are the authoritative reference.

Every dataset SchoolAtlas draws on, with its publisher and retrieval date, is listed on the Sources page.

Schools to compare

SchoolAtlas does not compare schools itself. Take the prompt below to an AI assistant: