An Exploration of School Quality, House Prices and Geographical Location in Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract

ISCR and Victoria University of Wellington undertook a project with Sarah Crilly, a Higher Diploma of Data Science and Analytics student at the Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland in a project investigating school quality measures and house prices in Wellington, New Zealand. This project was presented at the Central Statistics Office, the Irish equivalent to Statistics New Zealand, at a Data Science seminar on the 31st of April 2014. This project investigates available school measures, their use as measures of school quality and explores whether school quality is associated with house prices in Wellington, New Zealand. Geographical Information Science and Systems (GIS) is used as a descriptive and analytic tool in tandem with multiple linear regression and k-means clustering. It is found that a socioeconomic measure known as school decile, student ethnicity and assessment results are likely school quality measures. The association between school quality measures and house prices is found to be statistically significant but not strong.