The new school year is right around the corner.
With so many families participating in the recent exodus to the suburbs, both the location and the quality of their children’s education will be top of mind.
Let’s take a look at how you can quickly and easily locate your child’s new school, and how you can check on that school’s performance rating using Fraser Institute rankings.
Step 1: Determine Your New School Board
Step 2: Find My School Using Address
Step 3: Find My School's Rating
Navigate Fraser Institute Ratings
Step 1: Determine Your New School Board
If you’ve moved to a new city or municipality in the past several months or are planning to, the first step is to understand which school board your child now belongs to.
The Ontario Ministry of Education website allows you to perform a simple search on school and board names. You can also do an advanced search that allows you to also include city, language, level and type in your search criteria.
Ministry of Education – Find a School or School Board
You can also just Google the name of your city and school board. For example, 'Burlington School Board', and the results will indicate which board you belong to such as Halton District School Board.
Step 2: Find Your School Using Home Address
Most every school board in Ontario offers an easy search tool that allows you to find your child’s new school based on your home address. This avoids the need for interpreting school boundary maps, which can be confusing.
Find My School
Once you've arrived at the school board Find My School website, just enter your home street address, street name and city. Then select the grade and program type (English or French, etc.), and click SEARCH.
This will pull up the school options that apply to your home address.
Here’s an alphabetical list of some GTA school boards with a direct link to each one’s Find My School feature:
- Durham District School Board > Find My School
- Durham Catholic District School Board > Find My School
- Halton District School Board > Find My School
- Halton Catholic District School Board > Find My School
- Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board > Find My School
- Peel District School Board > Find My School
- Thames Valley District School Board > Find My School
- Toronto District School Board > Find My School
- Toronto Catholic District School Board > Find My School
- York Region District School Board > Find My School
- York Catholic District School Board > Find My School
Step 3: Find Your School's Rating
Fraser Institute's School Report Cards offer detailed tables showing how well schools performed in academics over a number of years.
By combining a variety of relevant, objective indicators of school performance into one easily accessible public web site, the school report cards allow teachers, parents, school administrators, students, and taxpayers to analyze and compare the academic performance of individual schools in an attempt to answer the question ‘how are our schools doing?’
Click here to find your school’s rating.
“The Report Card is a valuable tool for parents...as a source of objective data that they use when they are choosing a school for their children,” said Peter Cowley, a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute’s School Performance Studies.
How does the Report Card help? In short, it helps parents choose.
Where parents can choose among several schools for their children, the Report Card provides a valuable tool for making a decision. Because it makes comparisons easy, it alerts parents to those nearby schools that appear to have more effective academic programs.
Parents can also determine whether schools of interest are improving over time. By first studying the Report Card, parents will be better prepared to ask relevant questions when they visit schools under consideration and speak with the staff.
Each school’s results are based on data provided by Ontario’s Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO). However, the Fraser Institute may display some of the results in different ways than does the EQAO. This is done to make the results as useful as possible to parents and educators.
Click here to find your school’s rating.
The Fraser Institute website also encourages parents to consider complementary information when deciding on the best school for their children. Web sites maintained by Ontario’s Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), the provincial ministry of education, and local school boards may also provide useful information. Parents who already have a child enrolled at the school provide another point of view.
“The Report Card is a valuable tool for parents...as a source of objective data that they use when they are choosing a school for their children,” said Peter Cowley, a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute’s School Performance Studies.
A total of 3,037 schools are rated and ranked on the Fraser Institute’s website and the data covers a 5-year period. This allows parents to understand whether the school is improving, declining, or maintaining the status quo.
Navigate Fraser Institute Ratings
Click here to go to the Fraser Institute Ratings home page.
Once arriving on the home page, simply type your school name or select from the drop-down menu:
This is what will appear once you have selected your school from the home page:
You can view the 5-year history of the school by scrolling down:
Click here to find your school’s rating. ***
For more information, click below for complete reports:
Fraser Institute's Report Card on Ontario’s Elementary Schools
Fraser Institute's Report Card on Ontario’s Secondary Schools
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