I did high school and college in Canberra, and for the most part had good experiences … though my high school was on the rough side. I loved the public school college system, as distinct from the high school system in the rest of the country. It treated students as able to make their own decisions, which made for a much more enjoyable final two years than they might otherwise have been.

“I hated school, and it took me several years of uni to recover from it, which is why I feel a little ill at the idea of sending the kid to school at all. ”

D’accord.

Thing is, a lot of the problems are caused by middle class flight and, I think, that will go a long way to improving matters if a mass movement back to public does happen. (Remember it’s my speculation.) But it’s sad to think how her fears are so OTT.

I hated school, and it took me several years of uni to recover from it, which is why I feel a little ill at the idea of sending the kid to school at all. Hearing local teachers in our playgroup, who have older school age kids as well as the playgroup age ones, talking about what’s wrong with our local schools hasn’t done much to help. However, there’s a new principal in town and things are looking up.

Or come up north/ northeast to Viewbank territory…

Our wee one is in year four this year and, having just moved to Melbourne, within TWO DAYS of her starting I had the ‘So what college are you going to send her to?’ question from four different sets of kids’ parents. All with anxious eyes, as if my answer might influence their decision and vice versa.

Answer is – we don’t know. We have Debney Park high school in our street, but despite the inclusion in a story in the Saturday Age yesterday, it is not the cultural mix or the year 12 results that concern me, it is how utterly crappy and tiny the school is. It is virtually a three-storey block of flats, some littered bitumen that is frequented by drunks and druggies out of hours and never cleaned up and a scrappy patch of grass that isn’t big enough for a game of french cricket, let alone the real stuff.

I am already in knots about whether to ‘sacrifice’ a child to what seems like a poorly equipped school with a lot of social problems – is such a decision going to be worth that smug dinner party conversation in future?

My ex boss (who is a nationally recognised academic on work/life balance issues but has none herself and is the worst, most insecure and nasty person I’ve ever worked for – let’s just call her Professor Bulldog Peacock) used to brag endlessly in staff meetings that neither of her two teenage kids were going to private school.

…..yeah, that’s because she and her partner had sold up their modest house in the Adelaide hills for a home in the ‘catchment area’ for Adelaide’s three finest high schools that cost them an additional $400,000. When I put it to her that such a decision might be out of the realms of, oh I don’t know, the ‘low paid poor’ that she likes to witter on about publicly, the look on her face pretty well asked me if I wanted an oak casket or straight cremation.

However, do I bear to ignore my distaste about being too competitive and instead of mortgaging my left arse cheek to get into the right area, try to see if C can get into the much-discussed-but-never-seen ‘University College’ in Parkville? Legend has it that the school is so severely zoned that they even visit you at your home to check that you’re not lying.

We can’t afford to live in Parkville (and nor do we want to) but *I’d* be the one telling a fat one if I didn’t say that, when the time comes, we won’t be encouraging young C to sit their much-discussed-so-therefore-must-be-very-important selection tests.

Hubster Love Chunks and I are both products of large, unruly and disheveled country high schools and I don’t wish that on my daughter. Having seen a student passed out in the toilets (in year 9) due to aerosol inhalation and the police deciding to send in sniffer dogs to our the lockers on a regular basis, I can only thank my parents and mates for keeping me focussed and sane. Even then, if my father wasn’t an actual teacher at the same school *shudder*….. That’s not to say that drugs, stupidity, bullying and lack of focus on studies won’t happen at Poncy College or Groovy Govt, but it seems sadly very likely that such schools are better equipped and ‘luckier’ in landing building grants, large donations, interested parents etc.

Paying for college is the utterly last resort for us. Having only one child means that we could afford to do it, but the righteous self-entitlement I’ve seen in the children of parents who did it (the richies in our home town were packed off to boarding school) made me sick. I want C to enjoy the company of a range of people; not just rich knobs or brainiacs offered scholarships to beef up the VCE rankings.

What is the answer here? Let the kid decide??