SCHOOL PLANNING SYSTEM.

The School Planning System is a mapping application used by the School Provision Business Unit of the Department’s Facilities and Infrastructure Branch to assist in the strategic provision of government education facilities state-wide. The system includes all government primary and secondary schools in Victoria and "neighbourhood catchments" are assigned to each school. Relevant population forecasts are determined for each school and its facilities provision analysed. Catchment polygons are aligned with significant map features like major roads and freeways, rivers, railway lines, transmission lines, national park borders, lakes and quarries, etc sourced from the state digital dataset. The forecast data is comprised of ABS Census of Population and Housing data and Department of Infrastructure population forecasts. The LTE system is used to maintain the catchment areas assigned to each school, undertake ad hoc spatial queries and output relevant maps that display the catchment or queried area, with map detail.

OMNILINK developed and implemented the system with the following summarised business requirements:

• Map and catchment presentation on screen and in print, including expanded map data filtering options.
• Production of cartographic plots using standard templates.
• Additional transport and address datasets imported to database and used for display, output, querying, navigation, etc.
• Improved search functionality via the use of a standard search gazetteer. (E.g., locate Sydney Road, Brunswick and retrieve map details for requested entity.)
• Customisation of polygon export to other GIS formats (e.g., mif/mid; shp etc).
• Customisation of geo-coding query as it relates to plotting student street addresses to school of attendance.
• Facilitation of a range of ad hoc spatial queries using the existing map model. E.g. finding and displaying objects based on location conditions (all schools within a given radius of a specified point), data conditions (display all primary schools in an LGA where LGA name equals "Brimbank") or external conditions (display all schools for the school numbers listed in a given Access or Excel file).
• Incorporation of Local Government subdivision-approvals data.
• Provision of an on-line facility for Managers and Regional Directors to request and print LTE records for a school or for a group of schools, including outputting the relevant catchment maps and additionally create a catchment scenario for a school or for a number of schools and output the relevant data and maps.
• Provision of an on-line facility for Principals to request and print the LTE records for their school, including outputting the relevant catchment maps.
• Enablement of the secure electronic transfer of information between School/Region and the School Provision and Planning Unit.