Grade 6: Enrollment vs. Registration

How well does EQAO Grade 6 registration match Ministry of Education enrollment headcounts? Which boards and schools show the largest gaps?

Data Sources

• EQAO: G6 achievement results — cntStudents_Read (registered), cntFullyParticipating_Read (fully assessed), 2021-22 through 2024-25
• Ministry of Education: OnSIS October enrollment by grade, same four years

How Schools Are Matched

Schools are matched by SchoolMident + school_year, with a board-ID cross-check at every step.

One important identifier quirk: EQAO stores SchoolMident without leading zeros (e.g. "45578"), while the Ministry enrollment file stores it with leading zeros (e.g. "045578"). Zero-padding the EQAO identifier before matching is what drives the overall match rate to ~99.9%.

A second layer of confidence comes from board-ID cross-validation: every Mident match is confirmed against the board (EQAO.BoardMident must equal enrollment.BoardNumber after stripping its B prefix). This validation produced zero rejections in practice — every Mident match is also a board match — confirming the identifiers are reliable across both datasets.

The match tiers, in priority order:

Match Quality

Match Rate by Year

Summary by Language

Crosstab: EQAO × Enrollment (English)

School-year observations by whether each school appears in EQAO and/or the Ministry enrollment file.

Student counts by cell (registered students from EQAO; enrolled students from Ministry):

Province-Wide Registration Rate

The chart below shows seven ways to measure "how many enrolled Grade 6 students ended up sitting the assessment." They differ in what counts as the denominator, how they handle schools where EQAO registered more students than the Ministry enrolled, and whether they weight by school.

Series definitions:

Why the aggregate and uncapped school-average diverge: Each year roughly 90–100 schools have a suppressed EQAO student count (cntStudents_Read = null) — typically very small cohorts where EQAO withholds counts for privacy. In the aggregate these schools add their enrollment to the denominator but contribute nothing to the numerator, dragging the province rate down. The per-school series excludes these schools entirely, so it reflects only schools with a reported count.

Why uncapped > capped: A minority of schools register more students than the Ministry's October headcount — administrative timing differences, split-grade programs, or enrolment updates. The uncapped series lets those schools exceed 100%; the capped series clips them to 100%.

Participation vs registration: cntFullyParticipating_Read counts only students who sat the assessment, whereas cntStudents_Read counts all who were registered. The gap between the two captures students registered but absent or exempt on test day (~3–5 pp provincially).

Max(reg, enrol) denominator: For schools where EQAO registered more students than enrolled, using max(registered, enrolled) as the denominator is a conservative floor — it never inflates the rate above what either dataset alone would show.

Bottom 50: Lowest Participation Rate vs Denominator (part / max(reg, enrol), capped)

The 50 school-years with the lowest value of fully-participating / max(registered, enrolled), across all four years. Schools appear here because of low absolute registration, high absenteeism/exemptions, or administrative anomalies (e.g. virtual schools with many registered but few assessed students).

Schools Without a Match

EQAO Schools: No Enrollment Record Found

EQAO school-years where no confirmed enrollment record was found. Where a near-miss exists (mident_board_mismatch), it is shown for reference only and is not used in any calculation.

Enrollment Schools: No EQAO Match

English elementary school-years in the Ministry file (with enrol_g6 present) whose SchoolMident does not appear in EQAO for the same year. Most are virtual or remote-learning schools created during COVID (2022–2023) that were never assigned EQAO school codes and did not administer the assessment.

Student Count Discrepancies (Matched Schools)

For matched schools, how does the EQAO registered count compare to the Ministry enrolled count?

Top 10: Registered > Enrolled

Top 10: Enrolled > Registered

Unmatched School Detail

Schools without an exact_padded match — i.e. mident_suppressed or none:

By Match Type

During development, fuzzy school name matching was explored as a fallback tier. It proved unnecessary — zero-padding Midents alone achieves 99.9% coverage, and fuzzy cross-board matching produced too many false positives.

Grade 3 vs Grade 6: Cross-Grade Comparison

How similar are the enrollment-to-registration and enrollment-to-participation patterns across grades?

Province-Wide Rates: G3 vs G6

Pattern: G6 registration runs ~5 pp above G3 every year (95–97% vs 90–92%). The fully-participating rate shows a similar gap (~3 pp). Both grades trend slightly downward from 2023 to 2025, and the gap between them is stable — suggesting a structural, not year-specific, difference. Grade 6 students are more consistently registered likely because it is an exit-year assessment: teachers and schools may treat G6 registration as a near-universal expectation.

Bottom-50 School Overlap

How many of the 50 lowest-participation school-years appear in both the G3 and G6 bottom-50 lists?

Pattern: Only 6 of 50 school-years (12%) appear in both bottom-50 lists, from 5 unique schools. Low participation is largely grade-specific: a school struggling in Grade 3 registration is not necessarily struggling in Grade 6, and vice versa. The one consistent exception is Blessed Carlo Virtual (Ottawa Catholic), which sits at the bottom of both lists in 2022 — a virtual school where very few students sat either assessment regardless of grade. Peel Virtual Elementary (Peel DSB) appears in both lists for 2023 and 2024, suggesting virtual-school operational issues persist across grades and years.