Education — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a place of education: a nursery, a school, a college or a university. There are more than 1.8 million worldwide, which makes this one of the largest maps on the site. Colour represents the level, and the size of a dot represents the ground the place covers. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as the level and who runs it. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every place here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from aerial imagery. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national list of schools.

What we include

Four exact tags, one for each level:

`amenity=kindergarten` covers nurseries, preschools and kindergartens, which is about a fifth of the map.
`amenity=school` is three quarters of it.
`amenity=college` means education after school but separate from a university, and is about 4%.
`amenity=university` is about 3%.

These four are OpenStreetMap's own levels, and they don't match any one country's system. An English secondary school, a German Gymnasium, a French lycée and an American high school all carry the school tag. No place on this map carries two of the four, so the classes never overlap.

Colour

Colour represents the level, and every place on this map has one, because the level is which kind of feature it is rather than a separate tag a mapper might have left off. That makes this one of the few maps here with no grey.

The colours run light green through teal and blue to deep violet, going up the levels, so more advanced education reads as darker without your having to check the legend. The scale stays legible in greyscale and for colour-blind readers. The cost is that neighbouring levels sit closer together in colour, so telling a college from a university at a glance is harder.

Why we don't colour by the level actually taught

OpenStreetMap has a tag for exactly the thing this map is about, the UNESCO level an institution teaches. We deliberately don't use it. It is recorded on under a fifth of schools, so most of the largest class would have had to be drawn as "not recorded". What coverage there is came mostly from bulk imports in a handful of countries, so a map coloured by it would largely show you where an import happened.

We don't show it in the panel either. Its values are statistical codes, which can't be translated and mean nothing without the standard in front of you.

Size

The size of a dot represents the ground the place covers in square metres. The levels differ enough to read on the map, running from a few thousand square metres for a typical nursery to several times that for a university campus. About a third of these places are mapped as a single point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size, below the places that do have a shape, so the real sizes still read.

Size is physical extent rather than importance, budget or number of pupils. The largest features are the places with the most land, such as agricultural research farms and the great land-grant university campuses, rather than the most prominent institutions.

Where the map is empty

An absent school means nobody has mapped it, not that it isn't there. Coverage is strongest in western and central Europe and other well mapped regions, and thinner in poorer countries, so a dense patch is a well mapped place first.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A school that closed or merged long ago may stay on the map until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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