Ontario Ministry of Education Data
Student and educator data including courses, enrollment, report cards, marks, credits, and educator assignment and performance appraisal for all public elementary and secondary schools in the province of Ontario, Canada.
Students and educators in all public-funded elementary and secondary schools in Ontario, Canada.
Access
Ontario Ministry of Education data are available to researchers by request. Researchers must contact [email protected] for data access. Researchers will be asked to fill out a Request for Information (RFI) form, which asks for their name, their company/organization they represent, a description of the requested dataset(s), the purpose of the request including the intended use of the data, and whether the data provided will be published or not.
Aggregate-level data can be shared to external requesters via the request for information process being followed by the ministry. Some data provisions may require a data sharing agreement based on the assessment of the ministry. Individual-level data are not shared with external requesters due to the risk of personal identification of students. Proposals requesting access to individual-level data will be evaluated and alternative approaches to conducting the same analysis without divulging individual-level data will be considered. For this same reason, ESAB does not divulge dataset entries containing less than ten records.
Timeline for Access
Timelines for access can vary as proposals are evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Lag Time
Records are updated every academic year. Only preliminary data is available for the most recent full school year, i.e., in 2021, 2019-2020 data is preliminary.
Cost
There is no cost associated with accessing the data.
Linking
All data are de-personalized and stored in the Ontario Ministry of Education data warehouse using an encrypted identifier. The Ontario Ministry of Education may conduct linking with datasets from other data sources, i.e., Statistic Canada, Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) and release aggregate results and analysis to researchers. Identifiers to link with external datasets are not available to external requesters.
Linking to Outside Data Sources
Ontario Ministry of Education data may be linked by the ministry to external datasets, upon request. The ministry plans to make linked data available within the Statistics Canada Research Data Centre’s Education Labour Market Longitudinal Platform in 2022.
Data Contents
The Ontario Ministry of Education collects data related to elementary and secondary school systems as reported by schools in the Ontario School Information System (OnSIS). A list of the data that the Ontario Ministry of Education collects can be found on their website here.
Partial List of Variables
Student Information:
- Demographics ( country and year of birth, year of entry, gender, status in Canada, postal code)
- School enrolment, course enrolment (grade, courses)
- Achievement (credits, marks, diploma/certificates, report cards)
- Program information (second language, special education)
Educator Information:
- Demographics (gender)
- Assignment (position, courses taught) Board and/or School Educator Assignment information (including position type, courses taught and Full Time Equivalency (FTE))
- Student Admission Form and Transfers/Retirements data
- Teacher Performance Appraisal (including New Teacher Induction Program (NTIP)
J-PAL Randomized Evaluations Using this Data Set
Oreopoulos, Philip, and Reuben Ford. 2019. “Keeping College Options Open: A Field Experiment to Help All High School Seniors Through the College Application Process.” Journal of Policy Analysis & Management 38 (2): 426–54. doi:10.1002/pam.22115.