Ingest without hiding gaps
Raw source payloads, source releases and retrieval dates are retained. A missing website or grade is stored as missing—not manufactured.
Data methodology
Accuracy is a system, not a slogan.
Every published school should be traceable, matchable and correctable. Here is how that works.
Our source hierarchy
We start with the most authoritative reusable source available for each country: government school registers first, current Catholic education authority directories where government data does not identify religious character, and tightly filtered open geodata only where neither provides a complete public record. Every school keeps its source release, retrieval date and original source payload.
Match conservatively
Name, address, phone, city and postal code are scored together. Ambiguous records remain in review instead of being merged automatically.
Geocode with provenance
Coordinates come from NCES, the U.S. Census Geocoder, Statistics Canada’s Open Database of Educational Facilities or an exact-address OpenStreetMap lookup. Directions links carry the full school name and address to Google Maps.
Cross-verify current status
Older-only U.S. schools are quarantined as candidates. They become public only after a current authoritative source supports the match. Current Canadian records are tied to government, Catholic authority, association or official school evidence.
Review corrections
Correction submissions require a source and are reviewed before data changes. Every material change can be logged.
Country coverage
United States records begin with the U.S. Department of Education’s NCES Private School Universe Survey and are reconciled with current Catholic directories and school networks. Canadian education is jurisdictional, so each province or territory has a documented government, Catholic authority, association or official-school source path.
Australia uses the ACARA Australian Schools List and publishes every active Catholic systemic campus identified by the register, including registered special and flexible-learning campuses; ACARA supplies exact campus coordinates and locality/postcode but not a street line, and the site labels that limitation. England uses the Department for Education’s daily Get Information about Schools download. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland use their respective government school lists, including Catholic special schools where the source does not publish an ordinary grade span. New Zealand uses the Ministry of Education school directory. South Africa publishes every individually enumerated row in the Catholic Institute of Education’s current school directory and all 26 rows in its current Catholic skills-centre directory. Its post-school baseline also uses DHET’s 8 May 2026 private higher-education register and current Catholic diocesan, seminary and institution sources. A lagging DHET entry for St Augustine College is excluded because the institution’s own site says it permanently closed on January 1, 2026; the proposed Catholic Institute of Higher Education is excluded until it becomes operational.
India combines the Association of Catholic Educational Institutions’ public member-school directory for Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand with mapped school features that carry an explicit Catholic denomination tag across additional states. The association identifies Catholic membership but usually does not publish a PIN, coordinates or grade span; those fields remain blank. OpenStreetMap records are independently selected for explicit Catholic tagging, and grounds or non-school features are excluded. India coverage is therefore a growing verified subset, not a national-total claim.
Administrative offices, online-only programs, closed schools and records without enough source or location information are excluded from public counts. A rejected row is preferable to a padded total.
What “all schools” means
There is no single compulsory real-time registry of every Catholic school worldwide. Coverage and religious-character fields differ by country. We publish measured, source-specific coverage and identify remaining gaps instead of padding totals or calling historically Catholic institutions current without evidence.
Google data
Google Maps links work without an API key. Ratings, opening hours, phone numbers and website links, when enabled, are requested through an authorized Google Places integration and displayed live with required attribution. We do not scrape Google Maps or permanently copy restricted Places content.
Important limits
Directory facts are a starting point. The school is the final authority for admissions, tuition, accreditation, curricula, religious formation, accessibility, transportation, calendars and program availability.