SchoolScan CA — Canadian school directory
9,300+ schools across Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta, unified into comparable profiles with boards, grade ranges and language programs.
One directory, three provincial systems
Education in Canada is run province by province, and so is the data: each government publishes school records on its own portal, in its own format. A family relocating from Toronto to Calgary has to hop between incompatible official sites just to shortlist schools. SchoolScan CA merges Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta into a single directory where every profile follows the same structure.
The site walks users through a deliberately simple flow — search, compare, decide — aimed at parents rather than analysts: board, grade range, language program and location, always in the same place on every page.
Features parents actually use
- Search across schools, cities and boards, with filters for province and school level.
- Province hubs: Ontario with 4,855 schools, Alberta with 2,665 and British Columbia with 1,824.
- Four school types explained and browsable: public, Catholic, independent and francophone.
- Language-program pages covering English, French and French Immersion instruction.
- A French Immersion hub collecting 276 schools by province, city and school board.
- Guides, statistics and a blog — choosing a school in Canada, moving between provinces, online learning options.
Coverage you can count
Every number is backed by provincial open data, documented on the site's own data-sources page. Browse the live directory at schoolscan-ca.com.
Built for scale from day one
Under the hood sits a fully custom Laravel + PHP application on MySQL, with three provincial datasets normalised into one schema. That single source powers thousands of pages — school, city, board, type and language program — served near-instantly, without themes or plugin stacks.
Rankings come from programmatic SEO plus structured data (Organization, WebSite, SiteNavigationElement, FAQ), so a query as specific as French Immersion schools in a particular Alberta city lands on a page generated precisely for it.
Questions families ask
Which provinces does SchoolScan CA include?
Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia — 4,855, 2,665 and 1,824 schools respectively, adding up to more than 9,344 schools across over 1,289 Canadian cities.
What does each school profile contain?
Contact details, the school board it belongs to, grade range, language programs and location — presented identically for every school so profiles can be compared side by side.
Can I use it to find French Immersion programs?
Yes. A dedicated French Immersion hub gathers 276 schools, browsable by province, city and school board, alongside general language-program pages for English, French and immersion.
How is the data sourced and refreshed?
Everything comes from provincial open data portals, and the site keeps a public data-sources page describing which portal feeds each province and how often each source is refreshed.