Who do you barrack for and where did you go to school?

According to The Age’s Editor Patrick Elligett, these are the two questions you are almost guaranteed to be asked within minutes of meeting someone in Melbourne. While the city’s obsession with Australian rules football is legendary, its preoccupation with education and schooling is almost as pervasive.

The Age newsroom has leaned into this appetite for education content combined with lessons learned about the effectiveness of high-utility data interactives to launch the new Victorian Schools Guide. This tool aims to empower parents navigating one of the most significant and emotional decisions for families: choosing a school.

Audience data, including acquisition insights from hard paywalled articles, has continually demonstrated the outsized value of education content, so much so that it served as a key pillar in our recent brand campaign.

Through our data, we have uncovered nuanced distinctions among content that engages our loyal subscribers, content that drives subscriber acquisition, and that which broadens our top-of-funnel reach. Education is one topic that manages to do all three simultaneously for both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Data-led journalism

By continually covering yearly NAPLAN results (standardised school testing), VCE and HSC (end-of-school) results, and university course offerings as well as education beat reporting, our mastheads have established themselves as authorities on the topic.

The Age’s yearly special series, Schools that Excel, uses a decade of data to celebrate significant and sustained success in local schools. This series is a prime example of utility-driven, interactive data journalism proving particularly valuable to our audiences. It is also designed to be as easy-to-use as our reporting is authoritative.

The Schools Guide builds on this experience with a first-of-its kind interactive database designed to be a one-stop shop for school performance. The tool allows readers to dig into the data of every school in the state.

The Schools Guide isn’t just a list; it’s a sophisticated dashboard that allows users to:

• Search by proximity: A map-based interface shows schools within a 10km radius.
• Track longevity: “Schools that Excel” data is integrated, highlighting institutions with 10-year improvement trends.
• Go beyond the median: While the median study score is the benchmark, we allow parents to see “top subject” performance, revealing which schools excel in specific disciplines like physics or arts.

In its first week of publication, the interactive generated outstanding subscriber engagement and was the top converting piece of content for the period. While it services our current subscribers, it is also a bridge to a younger demographic by complementing our campus education hub for university students and our targeted campus access subscription model.

An evergreen engagement tool

The guide is designed to be an evergreen tool. To maximise its impact, we built a dedicated landing page, which will be continually refreshed with stories drawn from the tool’s data.

We are also employing a “bespoke paywall” strategy with messaging that emphasises the exclusive nature of this data and reminds readers of the value of a subscription.

We launched the guide with an early preview sent to readers of The Age’s “Note from the Editor” newsletter, followed by a dedicated solus e-mail to our full subscriber base. Our education editor produced a vertical video for social media and on-site play, explaining how to use the tool.

The insights gained from our audience data regarding education journalism have led to the creation of a resource that does more than tell readers what is happening in their schools; it gives them a tool to make better decisions for their families.

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