School district
SD61 Greater Victoria School District
SD61 serves the central part of the region. As with every district here, the catchment school for a home is determined by address through the district’s own locator, not by which municipality the home sits in.
What the district covers
SD61 Greater Victoria serves the City of Victoria and the central municipalities around it. The precise boundary is the district’s to state and is published by them; it does not align neatly with municipal lines, and a home near a boundary should never be assumed into a district.
Confirming the catchment for an address
Use the district’s official school locator with the full civic address. It returns the catchment elementary, middle and secondary schools. That result is the answer; a listing description is not.
Catchment assignment and available space are separate questions. Where a school is at capacity a district may direct students elsewhere, and that is decided each year rather than being a property characteristic.
Programs of choice
French immersion and other programs of choice run their own admission processes, often separate from neighbourhood catchment. Buying within a catchment does not secure a program place.
SD61 Greater Victoria in figures, 2025/2026
The Ministry lists 46 public schools in SD61 Greater Victoria in our data: 28 elementary, 10 middle and 8 secondary. They sit in Esquimalt, Oak Bay, Saanich, Victoria, View Royal. 18 of them list a French immersion programme. Neighbourhood-school enrolment was 20,603 in 2025/2026, up5% from 19,632 in 2017/2018 (our calculation from the Ministry's counts).
Secondary schools: Esquimalt High School (Esquimalt); Lambrick Park Secondary (Saanich); Mount Douglas Secondary (Saanich); Oak Bay Secondary (Oak Bay); Reynolds Secondary (Saanich); Spectrum Community (Saanich); Victor School (Victoria); Victoria High (Victoria). This is a list, not a ranking, and it says nothing about which school serves a given address.
What the numbers say about SD61
Enrolment in SD61's neighbourhood schools has been close to flat: 19,632 students in 2017/2018 and 20,603 in 2025/2026, with a dip in 2020/21. That is a different planning picture from the West Shore, where the same measure grew by about a third (our calculation from the Ministry's counts). The 2020/21 school year cost SD61 931 neighbourhood-school students in a single year, and the district did not pass its pre-2020 level again until 2022/23.
The name misleads a little: more of SD61's schools are in Saanich (25 of 46) than in the City of Victoria (12), which is worth knowing when you compare a Saanich address with one closer to downtown.
The district is not the same as a municipality. Most of Saanich is served by SD61, but its schools also sit in Victoria, Oak Bay, Esquimalt and View Royal, while the northern part of Saanich belongs to SD63 (Claremont Secondary is an SD63 school in Saanich). Part of View Royal is in SD62: the Town levies both districts' school tax rates. A home near any of these lines should be checked with the locator, never assumed.
To confirm the catchment school for a specific address, use the district's own school locator.
Sources, checked 24 September 2026
Before you rely on any of this
This is general information about how things work in British Columbia, not advice about your situation, and it is not legal, tax or financial advice. Rules, thresholds and programs change. Anything that turns on a current figure or a statutory period should be confirmed against the primary source or with the relevant professional before you act on it.
Related
SD61 serves City of Victoria real estate, Oak Bay real estate, Esquimalt real estate, View Royal real estate, Saanich real estate and Greater Victoria school districts.