School daze

Before you dispatch your little darlings to the high-decile doozy, ask yourself: could they be just as happy down the road? By Fiona Barber.

“Good schools”: Two words that are slipped effortlessly into conversations as established fact. You’ve probably heard them during the incessant over-barbecue/latte blather about where to send your kids and where to avoid like the plague.

Trouble is, these assertions are often based on well, not very much at all. I wonder how many of those delivering their expert opinions ever visited the schools in question, talked to staff and as Dennis Denuto so eloquently articulated in the movie The

Castle, got “the vibe”. Did they read the ERO reports, talk to parents of students who attend or even the kids themselves?

Probably not, because they’d already decided to drive out of their suburb to Decile 10 Spit and Polish Intermediate, which they’d “heard” was a good school. You get the drift.

We all want what’s best for our kids, but “high decile” does not necessarily equal high quality and neither does “private”. More often than not, what you’re looking for is a few streets away.

I was reminded of how easily we can fall prey to fear and dodgy school reputations when, just before Christmas, I started chatting to a woman as we waited in queue for coffee. We breathed a sigh of relief that the ghastly orgy of consumerism was almost over, then discovered we lived in the same neighbourhood. But, she said as she furrowed her brow and sighed, she was reluctantly selling up and moving across town because she wanted her kids to go to “good schools”.

Seems the intermediate and college my child attended were not good, at least not good enough. I must have been busy in those decades because I didn’t notice drug dealers at the gate, pitiful exam results and the teachers swilling mojitos at lunchtime.

I implored my fellow Christmas shopping survivor to visit the local schools before slapping the “for sale” sign on the fence, but I suspect she was already visualising her kids in the smart blazers they wear across town.

We parents love tangibles – uniforms, exam results and punitive discipline policies that leave little room for mistakes and, as a result, redemption. But if our view of a good education is reduced to that, then God help us.

I’ve never forgotten a comment made by a fellow parent as our kids finished up at high school. He told me he’d pulled his children out of a highly regarded religious school and sent them to our neighbourhood college and, as a result, they were much happier. The local school tended to turn out pretty good human beings and that, he said, was grossly undervalued.

Don’t get me wrong, there are sound reasons some parents dispatch their kids to schools other than the local ones. However, a school reputation based on nothing but baseless chatter shouldn’t be one of them.

So before you decide the local school is not for you, get yourself down there and do a Denuto. You never know, you may just love the vibe.