What Ontario Publishes About Schools — and What It Doesn't

Any school ranking is limited by the data available to build it. This page is an inventory: what Ontario publishes about its schools, what it does not, and what follows from those gaps. We publish a ranking ourselves, so the constraints below apply to our scores as much as to anyone else's.

What is published

Sources for the above:[1][2]

What is not published at the school level

• Teacher qualifications, experience or turnover.No school-level dataset on teaching staff is published in Ontario's open data catalogue. This means the staffing of a school cannot be reflected in any Ontario school ranking.
• Suspension and expulsion data. The Ontario Data Catalogue listing for student suspensions and expulsions currently returns no downloadable resources through its API.[3] Because no school-level safety data is available to us, the safety indicator on our rankings page is present but disabled and carries no weight in any score.
• School climate survey results. Ontario school boards administer climate surveys, but results are not published in a consistent school-level public dataset across boards.
• Achievement in subjects other than literacy and mathematics. EQAO assesses reading, writing and mathematics only. No provincial assessment data exists for science, the arts, French, physical education or technology.
• Class sizes, principal tenure, and per-school spending. Not published at the individual school level in the open data catalogue.

Documented limits within the data that does exist

• Small cohorts are suppressed. EQAO suppresses counts below 10 in public aggregate data to protect privacy.[4] Schools with small reporting groups therefore have incomplete published results.
• Not all students are assessed. EQAO reports separate categories for exempt and absent students; reported achievement figures describe fully participating students only.[5] Participation rates vary between schools.
• Results are confounded with student background.The C.D. Howe Institute's Signposts of Success analysis adjusts Ontario elementary results for socioeconomic background specifically because unadjusted results reflect both school and family contributions.[6] We cover this in detail in the research on income and test scores.
• Assessment changes break comparability. Ontario replaced streamed Grade 9 mathematics with a de-streamed course in 2021, so Grade 9 results before and after that change measure different courses.

Why the weights on this site are adjustable

Any composite score requires a decision about how much each indicator counts. That decision is a judgement, not a measurement, and different reasonable judgements produce different orderings of the same schools.

Rather than present a single weighting as authoritative, the rankings page exposes the weights directly. Moving a slider shows how sensitive a school's position is to the choice. Our full scoring procedure — how indicators are standardised, weighted and converted to a 0–10 scale — is documented on the methodology page.