APN Meridian™ (Education Value Index)
APN Meridian™ is one of five pillars in the APN Social Capital Index™, measuring educational value and human-capital development from five components: schooling access & density, the tertiary/knowledge economy, current attainment (stock), career and educational advancement over time (trajectory), and early-childhood foundation.
Unlike Bedrock and Sentinel, no pillar in this branch requires polarity inversion at normalisation — every raw metric in scope is already “higher is better” in its natural direction (higher school density, higher tertiary participation, higher attainment, higher income/attainment growth, higher NQF rating).
Equal-weighted mean of five components (24131–24135), with the weight shared equally across the components available for each locality. No minimum-component floor is applied per geography: Meridian follows the flag-not-gate convention (same as Agora), where the component count is tracked and visible per geography rather than used to exclude thin-coverage rows.
Among localities with more than 200 residents, Tertiary Node & Knowledge (59.61) averages highest and Early Foundation (Childcare) (47.70) lowest. School Density & Sector Mix is ranked against localities with more than 200 residents. The other four components were ranked across every locality scored before a population floor was applied, so their means among localities with more than 200 residents sit away from 50.
Population floor (8 Aug 2026): a whole-geography population>200 floor was applied directly at the 24130 parent level, removing 7,641 of 14,425 localities and bringing Meridian into line with Bedrock, Agora, and Substrate. Equal weighting and the component-count convention are unchanged for the remaining localities.
Ranking pools: School Density & Sector Mix (24131) is ranked against localities with more than 200 residents. Tertiary Node & Knowledge (24132), Human Capital Depth (24133), Advancement Velocity (24134) and Early Foundation (Childcare) (24135) were ranked across every locality scored before a population floor was applied, and have not been re-ranked.
School counts (12 October 2026): the school counts behind School Density & Sector Mix were rebuilt from the state and territory registers and reconciled to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Schools 2025 count, and Meridian was recomputed. Tasmania is not scored on that component, so Tasmanian localities average four components.
The other four pillars of the APN Social Capital Index™ (24100).
- Equal-weighted mean of five components, ratified 29 Jul 2026
- Whole-geography population>200 floor applied at the parent level, 8 Aug 2026 (v0.3 coverage amendment)
