Victorian government schools
1,575 Victorian government schools, each from its most recent Annual Report, 1,558 of them 2025 and 17 from an earlier year still awaiting a newer report. Rebuilt 4 October 2026.
The Department’s register sorts government schools into five types by the year levels they teach. They are reported on differently, so they are ranked separately here rather than thrown into one table: a specialist school has no NAPLAN results to compare, and a primary school has no VCE.
| Type | Schools | What it is | Ranked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary school | 1,147 | Prep (Foundation) to Year 6, so roughly ages 5 to 11. | primary schools |
| Secondary school | 258 | Years 7 to 10, and in most schools Years 11 and 12 as well, to Year 12 and the VCE. | secondary schools |
| P-12 school | 80 | Primary and secondary on one site, so a student can stay in the same place from Prep to Year 12. These appear on both the primary and secondary tables, each time judged on that level's measures. | primary and secondary |
| Specialist school | 85 | For students aged 5 to 18 with disability and high needs, with eligibility criteria that depend on what the school specialises in. A student may be enrolled for their whole schooling. | specialist and English language schools |
| English language school | 5 | Intensive English for students who have recently arrived in Victoria from a language background other than English, usually for their first 12 to 18 months in Australia. Unlike a specialist school it is a step on the way somewhere: students move on to a mainstream school afterwards. | specialist and English language schools |
Designated purpose schools
The five types above describe the year levels a school teaches, and that is what the tables are split on. The Department separately designates some schools by purpose, and that cuts across the types: its list covers community schools, vocational schools, flexible learning options, English language schools, hospital and mental health schools, high ability schools, outdoor education schools, specialist schools, Virtual School Victoria, the Victorian School of Languages and youth justice settings.
A designation is not a school type. Melbourne High School is an ordinary Secondary school in the register and a High Ability school by designation; Somers School is Primary and an outdoor education school; Virtual School Victoria is P-12. They are ranked here alongside other schools of their level, which is why a selective school sits in the secondary table.
Specialist schools are the one designation the register does mark as its own type, and the Department divides them further by what they specialise in — autism, deaf, physical disability, and intellectual disability at several levels of need. That breakdown is not in the data published here.
Some designated purpose schools are not in the Department’s School Locations register at all, and so are not in this dataset: the hospital schools, the outdoor education schools apart from Somers, Yarra Me School, Sovereign Hill School and the Victorian School of Languages. What is here is every one of the 1,575 government schools the register lists as open.
How each school is judged
Every Victorian government school publishes an Annual Report to the School Community, and the Performance Summary inside it is written by the Department of Education. For almost every measure the Department publishes three numbers: the school's own, the average for a Similar Schools group it builds from that school's characteristics, and the state average. Each table ranks on the gap between the first two, so a school is compared with schools of similar intake rather than with the whole state.
Separately, 227 schools teach something particular — a bilingual stream, selective entry, the International Baccalaureate, a deaf facility. That is a list rather than a ranking.
Where to start
How to read this
Why the default ranking is not the study score
Sorting Victorian schools by raw results mostly sorts their intakes: the academically selective schools come first, then the wealthiest suburbs. That tells a parent which school admits the strongest students, not which school teaches well. The Department of Education already solves this by grouping each school with similar schools, so the default ranking here is the average gap between a school and its own Similar Schools group across the comparable measures. Every raw measure is still available in the Rank by menu.
What “above similar schools” measures
For almost every measure, the Department of Education publishes three numbers: this school, the average for its Similar Schools group, and the state. Subtracting the second from the first gives the school's gap on that measure, in percentage points. This column averages those gaps across the 24 measures that carry both figures, so it answers one question: does this school do better than schools with a similar intake?
0 is level with its Similar Schools group. A school at +10 is ten percentage points better than comparable schools, averaged across those measures. Negative is below. For scale, across the 1,501 schools ranked here: 754 sit at or above 0 (50%), and 66 reach +10 — roughly one school in 23. The range runs from -26.8 to +23.7.
Why small schools are scaled back
A gap measured on thirty students swings a long way on chance alone. Across this dataset the spread of gaps is about twice as wide for schools under 60 students as for schools of 350 to 1,200, which is what sampling noise looks like rather than small schools genuinely differing more. So each school's gap is scaled by the share of it that is signal, estimated from its enrolment: a 25-student school keeps about a fifth of its measured gap, a 400-student school about four fifths, and a large school almost all of it. Without this the top of the table was mostly schools of nine to thirty students. The unscaled figure is still available as Unadjusted gap in the Rank by menu, and as similar_schools_advantage in the JSON alongside each school's similar_schools_reliability.
One caution. The measures do not vary by the same amount between schools: student survey endorsement spreads across tens of percentage points, while VCE completion is squeezed into the few points below 100. So a school well clear of the pack here is often well clear on the survey measures in particular. A standardised version that corrects for this, similar_schools_index, is published in schools.json for anyone who wants it.
Disadvantage (the SFOE band)
The Student Family Occupation and Education index is the Department's measure of a school community's socio-educational disadvantage, reported as a band:
- Low — least socio-educational disadvantage
- Low-Medium — below average socio-educational disadvantage
- Medium — above average socio-educational disadvantage
- High — most socio-educational disadvantage
Suppressed figures
The Department withholds a figure when a cohort is too small: NDA where there is no data available and NDP where publishing it would risk identifying students. Those become null in the JSON, with the reason kept on the measure, and the school is simply not ranked on that measure.
Source and licence
School register: School Locations, published by the Department of Education on DataVic under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Performance measures: each school's Annual Report to the School Community, addressed by Department of Education school number, with the document's URL and checksum recorded on every school record. The Department's own guide to these measures is here.
JSON
Deep Almanac is a secondary source and this page is provided for general information and reference. It is not financial, investment, legal, valuation, educational or other professional advice, and it is not a substitute for checking the original source. Measures are the Department of Education's own published figures, taken from each school's most recent Annual Report, so a school's numbers are only as current as its last report; the Department suppresses a value when a cohort is too small to publish, and a single year can move sharply at a small school. You are responsible for any decision you or your software makes in reliance on this page. See our terms of use.