Methodology and sources
One rule governs everything here: a figure is published only if it can be traced to a named source, and shown with a link to it. Where a source is silent, the site says so instead of estimating.
Where each figure comes from
| What | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Every school, its roll number, address, ethos, gender, enrolment, patron, language of instruction, DEIS status | Department of Education school register (ArcGIS open data), CC BY 4.0 | 4,202 schools carry a named verification source. Updated annually; enrolment is the Department's most recent published year, stated on each page. |
| Preschools and early-years settings | Tusla Early Years register | A statutory register of providers. It carries a name and address and little
else, so these pages are deliberately sparse — and the sparsest are marked
noindex rather than padded out. |
| Special classes — how many, what type, which are new | NCSE open data | 1,995 schools. Datasets are matched by title, so a new school year is picked up without a code change. A sanctioned class is not a free place: availability changes through the year and the NCSE's local SENO is the authority. |
| Oversubscription, places, application deadlines | Each school's own Annual Admission Notice | 537 notices found and read, 89 yielding a ratio we are willing to publish. See below — this is where we are strictest. |
| Fees | Each fee-paying school's own website | Published only with the year and a link to the page it was read from. 17 of 59 fee-paying schools have a figure we could verify; the rest show none. That is a gap in our reading, not evidence the school is free. |
| Local house prices | CSO PxStat HPA04, median residential sale price by Eircode routing key | Joined on the school's own Eircode district. It describes the area, not the school, and a routing key can be large and mixed. |
| Area deprivation | Pobal HP Deprivation Index 2022 | Measured at Electoral Division level. It describes the population of an area, says nothing about a school's teaching, and should not be read as a quality score. |
| School transport eligibility | Department of Education scheme rules | Computed from straight-line distance to the nearest school of the right type: 3.2 km primary, 4.8 km post-primary. An indication, not a decision — Bus Éireann decides, and children in special classes travel under a separate scheme that these distances do not govern. |
How the admission figures are read, and what we refuse to publish
These are the numbers most likely to change a decision, so they get the most scepticism. A wrong ratio is worse than no ratio: it could talk a family out of a school their child would have walked into.
- Like for like, or labelled.A ratio divides one year's applications by that same year's places. Where a notice gives applications but no matching places figure, the comparison crosses two school years and the page says so in those words.
- The intake, not the school.Primary notices report a school-wide total and then break it down. Dividing a whole-school application count by a Junior Infants place count once produced 10.4 applicants per place at a school whose real figure was 2.9. We now pair the places and applications that sit together in one breakdown block, and show the school-wide total separately where it differs.
- The year is named.Some notices report on a year two or three back. The page names the year rather than saying "last year".
- Sub-intakes are rejected.A special class of three seats is not the mainstream intake. Ratios built on implausibly small denominators are discarded rather than published.
- Unreadable means unpublished.Where the notice cannot be parsed with confidence, we publish the link and no number, and say in plain words how confident the reading is.
Every school with a notice links to the document itself, so you can check our arithmetic against the source.
What we deliberately do not do
- No league table and no school ratings.No official body publishes a quality ranking of Irish schools, and constructing one from enrolment, fees or area deprivation would be inventing a measurement rather than reporting one.
- No catchment boundaries.Because none exist in law. Planning areas are shown as what they are: a Department planning instrument.
- No paid placement.No school can pay to rank higher, be featured, or have information removed.
- No estimated figures.A blank means we could not verify it. It never means zero.
Known limits
- Admission-notice coverage is partial. Schools publish them on their own websites in their own formats, some as scanned images we cannot read.
- Enrolment is the Department's most recent published year and will lag the current roll.
- 296 schools have no county in the source data; theirs is taken from the nearest school that has one.
- House prices and deprivation describe an area, not a school.
Found something wrong? Corrections are welcome and a correction from the school itself outranks anything we inferred.