My School

I wasn't suprised when my children's school didn't receive good results in the ACARA stats.

There are lovely things about the school: we started a school garden a couple of years ago, which is now flourishing; there's a chess club once a week; the school spirit at yesterday's swimming carnival was inspirational.

Also many of the teachers are close to retirement and burn out and there are a reasonable amount of "difficult kids". I know this because I volunteer in the school garden every week.

The school is in Urunga, which is a disadvantaged area. There's high unemployment, a lot of parents who left school well before the end of Year 10 and not much hope.

Yet we don't receive Priority School Funding, where disadvantaged schools receive extra money. This is because PSFP funding is determined by a survey that asks education levels of parents, and while there are many who left early, there are also a fair amount of new sea change parents who went to uni.

Unfortunately few of these new sea changing parents with University degrees are active in the school. And I would hazard a guess that this survey was one of the factors that was used in determining which schools were pitted against each other in the My Schools stats. This means that we were pitted against schools from areas with less disadvantage.

And so it becomes a quandary. Do I pull my kids out of a school with so much against it to give them a better chance in a more exclusive, and religious, private school? Or do I keep doing what I can to improve the school they're at because it's helping the whole community? Knowing all the time that in reality no school is perfect.