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.