Mapping UK Schools in OSM

Mapping Progress and Data Comparison Reports

Comparison maps showing mapping progress and possible errors by postal area. Only a very rough beta tool at the moment, and only covers schools in England.

OSM Tag Keys Report

List of all keys used on UK amenity=school and amenity=college ways and relations in OSM, ordered by number of occurrences. There are also indivual lists of objects with fixme and note tags.

Matching Queries

Report showing possible errors in the matching of OSM objects to UK schools using the ref:* key.

Official Data Queries

Report showing possible errors and omissions in the official government data for UK schools.

OSM Tag Lists

Various reports listing school objects with specific tags defined:

Overpass Turbo Queries

Schools as Nodes: An Overpass Turbo script to find nodes tagged with amenity=school or amenity=college. In many cases, these would be better converted to areas surrounding the whole of the school site.
Schools as Buildings: An Overpass Turbo script to find ways with amenity=school and building=*. In many cases, the amenity=school tag would be better moved to a polygon bounding the entire school site, rather than on any individual buildings.
Schools without Names: An Overpass Turbo script to find ways and relations with amenity=school but no name=* tag.

Tagging Guidence and Resources

OSM Wiki: amenity=school: Tagging advice and guidlines from the OSM Wiki.
How to Map a School in OpenStreetMap: Introductory tutorial by RobJN on the Mappa Mercia blog.

Notes on the data sources and matching algorithm uses in my tools above:

OSM data for ways and relations tagged with amenity=school or amenity=college last updated 2023‑03‑29. Data © OSM Contributors, ODbL.
Schools data for England and Wales obtained from Get Information about Schools service (formerly Edubase). Schools data for Scotland obtained from Scottish Government School Contact Details and cottish Government Independent School Register. Schools data for Northern Ireland obtained from DENI Schools Plus. These three datasets are probably Crown © and available for re-use under the OGL — according to the general website copyright notices. But none of the sites is explicit about the licence that applies to the specific datasets. There is a possiblity of third-party rights in some of the data that would not be covered by the OGL. The DfE have confirmed Edubase can be used under the OGL.
Schools in OSM are matched to the official data first by looking for a matching reference number (ref:edubase for Edubase, ref:seedcode for Scotland, and ref:deniirn for Northern Ireland). Then each unmatched OSM school is matched to the nearest unmatched official list location within 1km, with exact matches for postcodes and names being given priority. This still isn't optimal, and can result in various incorrect matches. Adding the ID numbers to the OSM data should fix things after the next import though.
Some school-like entities are often tagged as amenity=school or amenity=college but don't appear in the official data, and thus will show up as flase positives in the progress tall. Tagging suggestions to avoid these:
- Nursery schools or pre-schools should be tagged as amenity=kindergarten, which is not picked up by my tool.
- Boundary polygons for sites shared by more than one school, can be tagged with school=shared_site, which will tell my tool not to treat the object as a separate school.
- If a school has more than one site, then adding the same ref:*=* ID tags to each will mean all the site polygons are matched correctly.
- For adult education colleges (which aren't included in the official data), adding college=adult_education will tell my tool not consider the object as a school.