What school data is available in Placemaker?

Placemaker carries a profile for every school in Australia – where it is, who runs it, how many students it enrols and how that has changed over 10 years. Alongside those counts sit four indicator measures that describe the families each school serves. Every one of them counts something specific, and reading a measure as more than it counts is where a planning argument comes unstuck.

What's available

School identity and characteristics

School name
Suburb, as ACARA records it
Map location, as ACARA records it
Sector – government, catholic or independent
School type – primary, secondary or combined
Co-educational status
Year levels offered

Enrolments

Total enrolments across a catchment, per year, for the 10 most recent ACARA years
Enrolments split into primary aged and secondary aged
Enrolment history for each school
Current enrolments for each school
Five-year enrolment change, plus a status of growing, declining or stable

Indicator measures

Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) value
ICSEA percentile
Language background other than English
Capacity to contribute (CTC) score

School-age population

Primary aged (5 to 11) and secondary aged (12 to 17) population come from .id's forecasts, not from ACARA. They describe who lives in your catchment. Enrolments describe who attends school there. Those are two different populations, and the difference between them is usually the point of the exercise.

What each indicator measure means

Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA)

ICSEA is an ACARA scale describing the socio-educational advantage of the students who attend a school. ACARA builds it from parents' occupation, parents' school education, parents' non-school education, the Indigenous status of students and the school's geographic location, then sets the scale to a mean of 1,000 with a standard deviation of 100. A value above 1,000 sits above the national average.

ICSEA describes the students enrolled, not the people who live nearby. A school draws families from wherever they choose to send their children, which can be well outside any catchment you draw. It is not a measure of school quality, teaching or results, and it is not a measure of income – occupation and education are inputs, earnings are not.

ICSEA percentile

The percentile ranks a school's ICSEA value against every other Australian school. A percentile of 40 means the school sits above 40% of Australian schools and below 60%.

The comparison is national. .id ranks each school against every school ACARA reports on, not against the other schools in your catchment, your sector or your school type. A school can rank in the top quarter nationally and still be the least advantaged school in the catchment you're planning for.

The percentile inherits every limit of the ICSEA value it comes from. It also compresses in the middle of the distribution, where schools with meaningfully different ICSEA values can sit a percentile point apart.

Language background other than English

ACARA classifies a student as coming from a language background other than English where the student, or one or both parents, speak a language other than English at home. Placemaker reports ACARA's proportion for each school as published.

This is a household language measure, reported by families. It says nothing about a student's English proficiency, and it is not a measure of English language learning need.

Capacity to contribute (CTC)

Capacity to contribute is a Department of Education score describing a non-government school community's capacity to contribute to the running costs of the school. Since 2022 the Department has derived it from the Direct Measure of Income – the median income of the parents or guardians of students at the school, which the Department establishes by linking students to taxation data. A school's score averages its Direct Measure of Income scores over the previous three years.

CTC exists to set a school's Commonwealth funding discount. It is not a fee-affordability measure and it does not tell you what families at a school will pay. Because it is a three-year average it lags a change in a school community, and because it is a median it says nothing about the spread of incomes within a school.

Only non-government schools have a score. The Department doesn't assign one to government schools, and it exempts non-government special schools, special assistance schools, Majority Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schools and sole-provider schools.

Placemaker holds CTC at 2025 to match the ACARA vintage, even though the Department has published 2026 figures. That way every school measure you compare reads from the same year.

Where to find school data in Placemaker

School data appears in two places, drawing on the same underlying records.

On the map, the schools layer sits on the 'Locations' tab of the Layers panel. Turn it on to see every Australian school plotted, coloured by sector or by type. Select a school to open its card, which carries current enrolments, ICSEA, year levels, capacity to contribute for non-government schools and 10 years of enrolment history.

In Insights, the Education indicators tab brings school supply and school-age population together for a catchment you've drawn. The school details table there carries a row per school with every characteristic and indicator measure, including the ICSEA percentile and language background other than English.

Reading the data accurately

Three things shape what you'll see.

ACARA reports enrolments per school rather than per campus. On the map, a school with more than one campus appears as a separate point for each campus that has its own coordinates. In the school details table, a campus row carries its head campus characteristics – co-ed status, ICSEA, year range and capacity to contribute – but has no enrolment history of its own, and it isn't counted in any chart or total. This is why the table can list more schools than the charts.

A dash means ACARA or the Department holds no value for that field. It never means zero. Capacity to contribute shows a dash for every government school, and that dash means the measure doesn't apply.

Placemaker includes a school in a catchment when its recorded coordinates fall inside the boundary. A school just outside your boundary that draws heavily from inside it won't appear, so check the map before you conclude an area is underserved. Suburb comes from the ACARA record and isn't always right – where it matters, read the map position rather than the suburb name.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Does a school's ICSEA value tell me how good the school is?

A: No. ICSEA describes the socio-educational advantage of the families whose children attend, built from parents' occupation and education, student Indigenous status and school location. It says nothing about teaching, results or school quality.

Q: Is the ICSEA percentile worked out against the other schools in my catchment?

A: No. It's a national rank across all Australian schools in the ACARA set. A school can rank well nationally and still be the least advantaged school in your catchment.

Q: Can I use capacity to contribute to work out what families can afford in school fees?

A: No. Capacity to contribute is an input to a Commonwealth funding calculation. It's built from median parent and guardian income averaged over three years, and it doesn't tell you what any family will pay.

Q: Why do some schools show a dash instead of a capacity to contribute score?

A: Every government school shows a dash, because the measure applies to non-government schools only. The Department also exempts non-government special schools, special assistance schools, Majority Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schools and sole-provider schools.

Q: Why is capacity to contribute from 2025 when 2026 figures have been published?

A: So every school measure you compare reads from the same year. ACARA's latest release is 2025, and mixing a 2026 income measure with 2025 enrolments and ICSEA would make a school-by-school comparison unreliable.

Q: Why does the school details table list more schools than the charts?

A: Multi-campus schools. ACARA reports enrolments against the head campus, so a campus row appears in the table with its characteristics but carries no enrolments of its own and doesn't feed the charts or totals.

Q: How often does school data update?

A: Annually, following ACARA's release. Capacity to contribute refreshes at the same time so the vintages stay aligned.