mark nottingham

Vic Schools Mashup

Saturday, 30 June 2007

Australia

For the somewhat limited audience of parents looking at neighbourhoods and schools in Victoria, Australia, I present the Victorian Schools / Google Maps Mashup. Note that there are two pages; one for secondary schools, one for primaries.

It’s not perfect (in particular, many of the addresses only have street resolution), but it does include both state and private schools, with affiliations, approximate enrolment numbers, URLs where available. Additionally state schools’ markers indicate their Like School Group — a curious and very useful metric. Clicking on the map also shows you the closest non-selective state school (which in theory is the one your kids should go to by default).

Have fun and report bugs below.


8 Comments

Geoff Halprin said:

I found a lot of errors of location or ommission. You may want to look at the Melways [1] to get accurate locations. (They’re all marked, but it’ll be a lot of manual work.)

Specifically (I grew up inner east):

  • Kew Primary (Pakington St, Kew) was missing.
  • Xavier college (Barkers Rd, Kew) is too far west.
  • Gennezano (Cotham Rd, Kew) is too far west.
  • Camberwell Girls (Burke Rd, Camberwell) is too far north.
  • I’ve stopped looking. :-)

-g.

[1] http://www.street-directory.com.au/

Saturday, June 30 2007 at 11:32 AM

Geoff Halprin said:

P.S. Love the idea. :-)

Saturday, June 30 2007 at 11:33 AM

Darren Reed said:

An index on the page explaining what the letters and numbers mean would be nice…

…but what would be the killer bit of info. is if you can somehow get grades into it - like what was the average/min/max VCE that students achieved last year…

don’t know how you can rank primary schools though… is there some other statistic that the Department of Education in Victoria puts out that might be useful? such as the turn over of teachers, the number of serious problems with children, etc? although maybe that would require FOI’ing and knowing what to ask for?

I mean I don’t just want to see a map with where schools are, but how good they are too… and if lots of info can be presented in a condensed fashion (colours?), it would be interesting to see if there are trends in schools in various geographical areas of the city.

Monday, November 19 2007 at 8:22 AM

Darren Reed said:

Hmmm, where I went to primary school (Watsonia Primary) is wrong on the map but my secondary school is correct (Ivanhoe Grammar).

Loyola College (Catholic) is missing completely - there should be two schools, one in Watsonia and one in Greensborough.

Also, are you able to put schools for the mentally handicapped on your map? Although perhaps less relevant to most people, schools that specialise in catering to “special” children like that do exist.

There is some more information here too: http://www.gps-data-team.com/school-zones-download.htm (GPS data for schools!)

  • this may help with accuraccy of school location tags on your map?

Monday, November 19 2007 at 10:29 AM

inger said:

Hey Mark - just sent the mash up page to a friend and realised that the govt have moved the explanatory metric page…?

Perhaps you need to put a digest of the LSG metric on this page to orient newbies? (LOTS of parents want the information you have processed and I am for ever passing out this address!)

i

Friday, December 5 2008 at 5:50 AM