People who rent are becoming a larger percentage of the population over time. People are remaining renters longer and many are having children before purchasing a home. As such there is a growing population that has the capability to move relatively small distances to ensure their child's enrollment in the school of their choice. However, it can be difficult for parents to be able to compare schools and associated communities to identify the best school for them.
Many schools are enrollment managed. This means that there are limited spots for children who live outside of the schools catchment boundaries to attend. Having identified schools within the limitations they are prepared to move, parents are then required to search for these schools individually on the myschools website to get school performance (NAPLAN) information. This site does not allow the parents to compare the data against their chosen candidate schools.
Having identified high performing candidate schools, it is difficult if not impossible for parents to access data to estimate the likelihood of selected schools being able to accept out of catchment children based on the demographics (from the 2016 census data) of the catchment areas. Schools with a smaller number of placements located in areas with a large number of children per household are less likely to be capable of accepting out of catchment children than the schools that can accept a large number of placements in a catchment containing fewer children per residence. Compounding this, parents have to look elsewhere to work out the socio-economic profiles of the candidate areas, crime statistics, child care and open space access.
To address this growing need we are proposing a solution that combines the catchment area map, census demographics, enrollment capabilities, crime and local open spaces and school performance information into a single map that can aid parents in making good decisions for their children's education and life style.
