4220.0 - Schools, Australia, Preliminary, 2009  
ARCHIVED ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 28/01/2010   
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NOTES


ABOUT THIS RELEASE

This release contains a summary of state, territory and national data for the broad categories of schools, students and staff at the 2009 school census date of the 7th August. More detailed data, including derived participation and progression measures, will be published in Schools, Australia (cat. no. 4221.0), due for release in March 2010, or in the detailed Data Cubes and spreadsheets subsequently published on the ABS website.


SOURCE DATA

These data are sourced from the (non-finance) National Schools Statistics Collection (NSSC), which is a joint undertaking of the various state and territory departments of education, the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), and the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs (MCEECDYA). The scope of the collection is bound by the definitions of schools, students and staff which is available on request in the ABS Notes, Instructions and Tabulations (NIT). See also the Glossary of this publication.


CHANGES AFFECTING THIS RELEASE

In 2009, improvements were made to the student enrolment data collection process for government schools in the Northern Territory. This enabled better identification of duplicate student records, which were removed. This change will affect comparisons with previous years, of all data showing numbers of students or drawing on these numbers, for the Northern Territory and Australia.

In addition, Tasmanian education underwent a significant restructure of post-year 10 education in 2009. This reform, entitled Tasmania Tomorrow, created three new statutory organisations (called the Tasmanian Academy, the Tasmanian Polytechnic and the Tasmanian Skills Institute) from the merger of state government colleges (years 11 and 12) and TAFE Tasmania. In 2009 four of Tasmania’s eight government colleges, along with TAFE Tasmania, were restructured and brought under the authority of the Tasmanian Academy and the Tasmanian Polytechnic. The four remaining colleges continued under the authority of the Tasmanian Department of Education (TDE) and will transition to the new structure by 2012. Census data from the Tasmanian Polytechnic and the Tasmanian Academy were combined with TDE data to provide the NSSC submission for Tasmanian government schools. TDE undertook a process of data collection, cleaning, reconciliation and application of scope to ensure that the data provided to the NSSC fully complied with collection definitions.


ROUNDING AND CONFIDENTIALITY

Where estimates have been rounded, discrepancies may occur between sums of the component items and totals. Small values in tables have been perturbed to protect confidentiality.


CAUTION

The statistics in this release are preliminary and are subject to change.


INQUIRIES

For further information about these and related statistics, contact the National Information and Referral Service on 1300 135 070.