Spotting family resemblances in your kids is great – “He has your nose.” “She has your eyes.” “He has your giant head!” (This last was delivered accusingly at my husband the day after my son was born, although to be fair my own head has trouble fitting into ladies’ hat sizes.) Beyond the physical, genetics can also play a role in the development of our personality and even strange quirks. Nature – vs – nurture. You’ve all read the Peer Reviewed Studies, I’m sure.

Anyway speaking of strange quirks,  I have the adorable habit (my husband says “maddening tendency”) of playing Actor Spotto during movies.  Not with Big Name Actors like George Clooney or Meryl Streep but you know, the actors whose faces you recognise but you may not know their name. The sadly defunct website Fametracker.com called them “That Guys” as in “Hey! It’s That Guy!”

To play Actor Spotto (my version thereof) you have to exclaim something like “Oooh that actor playing the waiter. What was he in?” when a “That Guy ” comes on the screen. My husband (the B-List actor savant) will then give me the name of a movie. “Nope.  Don’t remember that one. It was a movie with a dog and maybe a rocket. And I think it was set in Europe somewhere. And it was snowing.” I won’t rest until I have the title. Thank goodness for the IMDB. We used to pause the movie to head downstairs to the computer to clarify (“shut you up” – my husband) now as soon as I say “Ooooh” he hands me his iPhone.

I have a nemesis in this game (“cruel and unusual punishment”) –  an actor called Michael O’Keefe, who, as his IMDB profile shows, has appeared in many many movies and TV shows over the years. My problem with Mr O’Keefe is that when I first met my husband, he and his flatmate were fans of one of O’Keefe’s early works, The Whoopee Boys. One IMDB user review calls it “Rude, crude, and absolutely hilarious”. They got two out of three right. This not long after he was in Caddyshack. Can you picture him now? This is the Michael O’Keefe in my head.

Now Mr O’Keefe has since appeared in many very Un-Whoopee Boys-like films and TV shows like The West Wing, Law and Order and Michael Clayton.  Being that this is acting, he changes his appearance for each character and he has of course grown older. He must be a very accomplished actor, because I never recognise him. Ever. And each time he appears my husband will say “Hey, that’s Michael O’Keefe” and I will disagree and we will bet fifty bucks of actual real (”pretend, because I’ve never seen it”) money on it and I will always lose.

So back to genetics. The other day we took the kids to see Avatar.  We’re a little way into the movie and looking fairly smashing  in our 3D glasses when my daughter jabs me in the ribs. “I told you to go to the toilet BEFORE we came in!”

“No, Mum. That lady – what’s she from?”

Sigourney Weaver. Ghostbusters.

My husband just smiled.

Tomorrow the government is launching its new school website “My School” and there has been lots of talk in the media about something called school league tables.  Imagine my disappointment when I found that these don’t involve throwing school kids onto a footy field and then we all run a tipping competition on who wins each week. Except it kind of does.

Now for the record, the My School website FAQ says there will be no such tables, and the site is merely to give parents greater information about choosing the right school for their kids and greater transparency when it comes to school results.

I want to know when it all got so complicated.

My kids go to our local school. It is at the end of my street, so convenience was probably a major factor in this choice. It is a large school so there are a lot of facilities. The area we live in covers a large spectrum of the socio-economic scale – which roughly translated means “we’ve got some very rich folks and some very poor folks and quite a lot of just folks”.  This school has a “good reputation” and achieves above the national average on the NAPLAN tests.  My kids are doing well academically and socially, and I have been delighted with their progress.  The school has a wonderful sense of community and the staff are brilliant.

My kids used to go to a different school. We used to live in a different area. It would be marked as an emphatic LOW on the socio-economic scale.  Gangs and drugs are well-documented in the area. The local school was much smaller. Small enough that a drop in as few as eight enrolments could result in one less teacher and one less class. I was told by people when I was enrolling my daughter, that this was a “rough” school, and not a “good” school.  I understand the school’s overall results on the NAPLAN tests were lower than or just on the national average. However my kids did well academically and socially and I was delighted with their progress. The school had a wonderful sense of community and the staff were brilliant.

This is the stuff that won’t be measured on a league table – a school’s sense of community and how engaged the staff are with the students.  It is the sort of stuff that you can only know by belonging to a school. How many people will look at the information on the My School site, and drive straight past their local school because they want something better for their children?  Unfortunately losing the support of their community will just send the “low” schools even lower.

If you want something better for your children, you are precisely the sort of person your local school needs.