How KuraData works

Our purpose

KuraData makes New Zealand education information easier to find, understand and use.

Our purpose is to help parents, caregivers, students and anyone exploring education in New Zealand access clear, useful information about schools, early childhood services and tertiary providers.

We bring together publicly available New Zealand government data and official provider information, organise it by location and education type, and add clear context where it helps people understand the data. Official data. Clear context. No rankings.

1. Government datasets

• Schools, early childhood services, tertiary providers, Māori-medium and Pacific-medium enrichment data, and school changes (new/closures/mergers) — all published by the Ministry of Education / Education Counts.
• Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, unless stated otherwise.
• Full detail on every individual dataset: Sources page.

2. Provider information

Some content on KuraData — for example, sections on a university's faculties, subject areas, fees, or scholarships — is sourced directly from a provider's own official website, separate from the Ministry's own directory data.

"Curated" means: KuraData selects, organises and rewrites information published by the provider, in a factual and neutral style — it does not reproduce the provider's own marketing copy. The underlying source page is linked from within the text, and the date KuraData last reviewed that content is always shown.

• Every curated section is reviewed by a human before publication — nothing generated automatically goes live without approval.
• Where present, provider-published information is always clearly separated from official government figures.
• This is currently limited in scope — most fiches show government data only, and coverage is expanding provider by provider.

3. Data periods & update frequency

• The Ministry publishes the Schools and Early Childhood Services Directories roughly every school term; the Tertiary Providers Directory and school changes workbook on their own separate schedules.
• We re-check and re-import each dataset on a similar cycle to its own publication schedule.

4. Source checks

• Every fiche and listing page ends with a "Data source" section, showing the source dataset, a link to it, and the date KuraData last checked it.
• That date is when we last imported the data — we don't always have the Ministry's own "last updated" date as a separate, independently confirmed figure, so we don't claim to.

5. Normalisation

• Provider, city and suburb names are converted into URL-friendly slugs.
• Ministry fields like "Definition" (used as a PTE's subject area) are used verbatim, not re-classified by us — see the PTE pages for how this is labelled.

6. Derived statistics

• City and category "key data" summaries (combined student roll, average Equity Index, location counts) are calculated by us from individual provider records — never published by the Ministry in this aggregated form.
• Non-commodity summary sentences (e.g. "Hamilton has 73 schools with a combined roll of...") are generated from real per-page data using fixed rules, not written by hand per page and not AI-generated free text.
• Text explanations (like what the Equity Index means) are written by us in plain English, separately from the official figures.

7. Geographic calculations

• Schools and early childhood services have official coordinates from the Ministry; distances shown on "nearby" and "near me" pages are calculated by us from those coordinates.
• Tertiary providers have no official coordinates. For universities, polytechnics and wānanga, we estimate a location from the provider's own address using OpenStreetMap geocoding — always labelled "approximate" and never presented as Ministry-verified. PTEs are not geocoded or mapped at all.
• All distances are straight-line ("as the crow flies"), not driving or walking distance.

8. Missing data

• When a field isn't published for a provider, we simply omit it — we don't estimate or invent a value.
• Aggregate figures (like a city's combined roll or average Equity Index) only count providers that actually have that field published, and say so.

9. Corrections

Spotted something wrong, or want a listing removed? Contact us. Some information is refreshed directly from official open data on a regular schedule, so a manual correction may be overwritten at the next import — the most durable fix is often for the underlying government record itself to be corrected.

10. Known limitations

• We don't currently show ERO (school review) reports, current fees, or term-by-term enrolment capacity.
• The Schools Equity Index (344–569) and the ECE Equity Index (1–4) are different, unrelated scales and are never comparable to each other.
• Tertiary statistics such as enrolments, EFTS or completion rates are not currently included — only directory-level information.