Schoolify

This project aims to process and analyze school data, primarily from data/school_data_final.json (which is a processed version of school_data_comprehensive.json and other sources).

Data Processing

1. Data Cleaning (clean_data.py): Normalizes school names, attempts to determine school type (Public, Catholic, Independent/Private), and maps postcodes to suburb names using an external CSV.
2. Geocoding (add_geocodes.py): Adds latitude and longitude coordinates to schools. It primarily uses a lookup table generated from Australian postcode data. If a school's location isn't found in the lookup, it falls back to using the Nominatim geocoding service.
3. Manual Data Merging (merge_manual_data.py): Merges manually collected or corrected school data with the automatically processed data.
4. Comprehensive Scraping (comprehensive_scraper.py): (Details to be added)
5. Data Comparison (data_comparison.py): Compares the processed data against official sources and identifies discrepancies or missing schools.
6. School Ranking (rank_schools.py): Loads combined academic metrics from data/downloads/combined_school_metrics.csv, preprocesses the data (handles missing values, standardizes names), normalizes scores, applies a weighted scoring mechanism to calculate an overall rank for each school, tracks year-over-year rank changes, and saves the output to data/processed_rankings.csv.

Features (Planned)

• Display school rankings, types, levels (Primary, Secondary, etc.), locations, scores (e.g., VCE), and distance from a searched suburb/postcode.
• Interactive map to show school locations.
• Filter schools by maximum rank (with unranked schools included at max setting), school type, school level, and maximum distance from a searched location.

Ranking Methodology

The Schoolify dashboard employs a differentiated ranking system for primary and secondary schools:

Secondary Schools:

• Ranked based on a Combined Weighted Average Score (CWAS) derived from key VCE performance metrics:
  • Median VCE Score
  • Percentage of VCE Scores 40+
  • VCE Completion Rate
  • Tertiary Application Rate
• Default weights for these metrics are 40%, 40%, 10%, and 10% respectively. Users can adjust these weights using the "Advanced Metrics" sliders.
• The CWAS for each school is then normalized (scaled from 0 to 1) across all ranked secondary schools. The final rank is based on this normalized score (higher is better).
• Rank Change: Calculation for secondary school rank change based on historical CWAS performance is a planned future enhancement. Currently, rank change for secondary schools may show "N/A".

Primary Schools:

• Ranked based on their government-published overall ranks. These ranks are re-indexed specifically within the subset of primary schools (e.g., the primary school with the best government rank gets rank #1 among primaries).
• Rank Change: Calculated based on the difference in their government-published rank from the previous year to the current year (if historical data is available).

Other School Levels:

• Schools categorized as 'Other' (e.g., Combined, Special) are generally ranked based on their overall_rank if available.

Getting Started

(Instructions will be added later)

Contributing

(Contribution guidelines will be added later)

License

(License information will be added later)