Schools — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a school. There are more than 1.3 million worldwide. Colour represents the level taught where somebody has recorded it, and the size of a dot represents the ground the school 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 school 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

We use one exact tag, `amenity=school`. That tag is OpenStreetMap's own, and it doesn't match any one country's system. An English secondary school, a German Gymnasium, a French lycée and an American high school all carry it. So this map shows a level of education rather than a local school type.

Nurseries and kindergartens are a different kind of feature and are not here. Colleges and universities each have a map of their own.

Colour

Colour represents the level taught, and this is the map's one real weakness. About four schools in five have no level recorded at all, and we draw those in grey. Of the rest, roughly one school in seven is primary, one in twenty is secondary, and a smaller number teach both on one site.

Grey is a real category here rather than a rounding error. It says nobody has recorded the level for that school, not that the school is unusual. The recorded fifth is also uneven, because most of the tagging arrived through bulk imports in a handful of countries rather than one school at a time. So the colours partly show you where an import happened. The dots don't, because mappers everywhere record where a school is, and that is what this map is mainly for.

There is no colour for nurseries, because almost every school marked that way also teaches primary.

Why we don't show whether a school is private

OpenStreetMap has a tag for who operates a school, and it is better covered than the level tags. We leave it out on purpose. In OpenStreetMap "private" means a non-government body runs the school. In English, a private school means one that charges fees. Those are not the same thing. An English academy is state funded and free to attend, and a trust runs it. Labelling it private would tell you something false about a real named school. We show who runs a school instead, by name, where a mapper recorded it.

Size

The size of a dot represents the ground the school covers in square metres. Many schools are mapped as a single point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size rather than the smallest. Whether a school is a point or an outline is mostly about how thoroughly somebody mapped it, not about how large it stands.

Size is physical extent rather than importance, budget or number of pupils. A rural school with a large field draws larger than a city school with more pupils and no ground.

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. That matters more here than on most maps, because school provision is one of the things you might want to compare, and the map's own completeness runs along the same line. 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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