Local intake areas for public schools in WA

Looking for data
1

I can find individual school intake zones via the https://www.det.wa.edu.au website such as Willeton High School Local Intake Area, I can download a pdf map from that page. Unfortunately those links do not provide anything in machine readable format, is it possible to get the all the schools in a spatial format such as a shapefile? It would be great if the Department of Education can provide this data on their website or Data WA.

I’m working on an app to determine the school intake zones that links with the NATPLAN and ATAR results on a map so that parents can easily determine the schools performance, intake area when buying or renting. I also think this dataset would be invaluable to other users.

2

The closest thing on DataWA would be the Alphabetical List of Western Australian Schools in the DataWA catalogue (This information is also available as an ArcGIS online map from their website Maps - School Information - The Department of Education). You could query the data custodian about this and other dataset access.

The LIA data may not currently exist in DataWA due to:

  1. The LIA maps data alone are only a guide so this data is not published to DataWA “The local-intake area maps are based on a written description of the local-intake area (LIA) for the school as published in the WA Government Gazette. Although the map closely represents the LIA description, for some houses near the boundary (especially on street corners), it may be necessary to refer to the written description.”
  2. Data comes from a different branch within DET, so it is not shared the same way (ie. on DataWA vs PDF maps)
  3. No one has asked them to upload the Schools LIA to DataWA…
  4. The LIA map data is restricted for some reason.
  5. Or the LIA boundaries are determined by each school, hence it’s not DET’s data to share…

Either way, this is a great question and I would also like to see this data more accessible

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3

I remember having this discussion with DET at the time and they were digitising the boundaries at the time (a few years back now). As Russ indicated, the gazetted boundaries are based on description and may be open to be challenged. I suggest speaking with the custodians to get access to the data.

Would be great to see the data on data.wa.gov.au as many commercial vendors (i.e. domain.com.au) provide local catchment information for properties and I believe they digitised this data themselves.

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4

I had a meeting with DET last year about this as we are seeking access to it to inform the ROM model - 8 months and haven’t heard back… They said at the time it was a resources issue, given that the “spatial” team isn’t strictly “spatial”. I’ll follow up again and post the reply when I get it.

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5

Gavin, I believe that’s the exact phrase they said many years ago when I engaged DET. From what it sounds like, the value is there and required by many agencies. Could this be a ‘mapathon’ to get it digitised to a level that allows agencies to use it?

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6

I finally heard back from the people at DET. They have an intake areas dataset spatially as an INTERNAL dataset, but they are not 100% with its confidence level so dont publish it externally. They are working through a project to iron out the anomalies though so it could end up externally available in the future.

The best they have available for general use is: Schools Online Department of Education Western Australia (det.wa.edu.au)

@dmottolini agree with the mapathon - maybe something the SSSI could organise with DET to get the datasets up to scratch for consumption externally?

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