Notability of schools

Background

At present schools do not have agreed WP guidelines. This is because several attempts at producing a schools policy have failed. The problem with past proposals is that they have been voted down by editors at opposite ends of the debate - the proposals were unacceptable to the 'all schools are notable' lobby because they accepted that some schools are not notable whilst they were also unacceptable to the 'no schools are notable' brigade for the converse reason.

The result of this impasse is that every school AfD has to be argued from first principles against WP:N. This is proving time consuming, not to say boring, as the same people rehearse the same arguments over and over again. In order to move forward we need guidelines and that will require concessions on both sides. The proposed guidelines are not based on inherent properties but pragmatically on an emergent consensus from what does and does not survive an AfD. For instance, some editors will still not be happy that Blue Ribbon schools are notable but they are asked to accept that Blue Ribbon schools don't get deleted, probably because a very good school tends to attract multiple awards and mentions. In other word, we shall say that Blue Ribbon schools are inherently notable not because they are wonderful but because they won't be deleted anyway so why waste our time on them?

Example

I offer the example of Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School as a case study. Here we have a clean, fully sourced article (far better sourced than many, perhaps most, Wikipedia articles) with assertions of notability. Yet some editors are still arguing for deletion. This is the sort of sterile, time consuming debate that we need to avoid.

Proposed notability guidelines

The following are considered inherently notable. In all cases this assumes that there is some encyclopaedic content; directory-only entries will be subject to deletion as db:empty:

School Districts (US) and Local Education Authorities (UK)
High schools (US) and high schools, secondary schools, comprehensive schools, grammar schools (UK)
Blue Ribbon schools (US) and Beacon schools, schools with a Grade 1 (outstanding) Ofsted overall assessment (UK)

Schools not falling into one of the above categories will generally not be notable unless notability can be demonstrated by sufficient reliable secondary sources that meet WP:N. Such schools should normally be merged into the school district or locality as an editorial action without need for an AfD.