Every Sydney suburb ranked by its catchment school score

What ICSEA actually measures

This matters more than the table, so it goes before it.

ICSEA stands for the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage. ACARA builds it from the occupation and education level of parents, how remote the school is, and the proportion of Indigenous students enrolled. It contains no measure of teaching, no measure of facilities, and no measure of how much progress students make while they are there.

Its actual purpose is comparison. ACARA publishes it so that a school can be set beside schools with a statistically similar intake, rather than against the national average. It is the control variable in that comparison. Reading it as a score for the school inverts what it is for.

Which means a high ICSEA catchment tells you that the families enrolled there tend to be professionally employed and university educated. It does not tell you the school is well run, and a lower ICSEA school may be doing considerably more for the children in it. If you want a measure of teaching, ACARA publishes NAPLAN results by school on My School, including progress between years, which is closer to the question most parents are actually asking.

The pattern in the data

Ranking Sydney suburbs by catchment ICSEA produces something close to a map of distance from the city.

The gradient runs one way at every step. Suburbs scoring 8.0 or above sit 15 km from the city on average. Suburbs scoring 5.0 or below sit 38 km out. The correlation between catchment ICSEA and distance is -0.49.

That is not a surprise once you know what ICSEA is made of. It is built from parental occupation and education, and those cluster near the centre of a city. The ranking is doing what it was designed to do. It is just not doing what the phrase "school rating" implies.

See the catchment schools for two suburbs side by side →

These figures assume a typical household and commute. Find the Sydney suburbs that fit your own budget →

Where the pattern breaks

71 Greater Sydney suburbs more than 20 km from the city have a catchment scoring 8.5 or above. These are the places where the distance rule does not hold.

One catchment often covers several suburbs

171 of the 492 catchment primaries here cover more than one suburb, so a large share of this table carries identical scores by definition rather than by measurement. The widest is Bilgola Plateau Public School, covering 10 suburbs.

Catchment boundaries also follow streets, creeks and main roads rather than suburb borders. Two houses on opposite sides of the same road can sit in different catchments. Treat the suburb as the starting point and check the specific address with the NSW Department of Education before it changes a decision.

Every Sydney suburb, ranked

All 760 suburbs, with the state primary and the state high school each address is zoned for. Score is the catchment primary's ACARA ICSEA percentile divided by 10.

What this ranking is not

• It is not a measure of teaching. ICSEA contains nothing about how a school is run, what it teaches or how far its students progress. For that, ACARA publishes NAPLAN results and student gain on My School.
• It is not a judgement about a suburb. A low ICSEA reflects the income and education of the families enrolled, which is a description of a community's circumstances, not of the children or the staff.
• It is not a catchment map. Boundaries follow streets, and they are redrawn. Check the address, not the suburb.
• It covers state primaries only. Private schools take enrolments from anywhere and selective schools take them by examination, so neither can be ranked by where you live.
• It says nothing about secondary. A suburb's catchment high school can have a very different intake from its primary.