I’ve been a principal for decades. Here’s how to choose a school for your child (it’s not the one you think)

Every year, parents of year 6 children sit at kitchen tables attempting to answer an inconvenient question. Is our local school good enough for my child?

I’ve spent 32 years as a teacher, principal and system leader. I’ve sat with hundreds of families nervously weighing this decision. And there’s something those parents deserve to know that isn’t in the brochures they’re clutching.

There’s zero wrong with the parental instinct they’re in the grips of – every good parent asks questions like this. But this particular question has been engineered, over decades, to point parents in a particular direction.

It leads towards waiting lists and unmanageable fees. It coaxes parents towards the school that feels like a utopian promise.

I don’t blame those families for a moment. But they’re making one of the most consequential decisions of their child’s life in a system that has been deliberately tilted against the option they’re walking past.

Let me tell you what the research says makes a school good. It isn’t the uniforms or the facilities. Nor is it the student cohort’s socio-economic, religious or ethnic composition. It’s definitely not their latest capital works project or even their median ATAR.

The consistent predictors of good life outcomes for children are a relational culture where students feel known and safe; teacher quality and stability; leadership that fosters deep belonging; and a community with a shared sense of purpose. None of these are owned by a sector and none appear in any fee schedule.

Visit a prospective school in person. Not on the open day when everything is window dressed, but on an ordinary Tuesday. Walk the grounds and observe how teachers talk to students in the corridor. Notice whether the principal knows kids by name. That’s how to choose a school.

Talk to parents whose children already attend – just choose them carefully. The loudest voices in the toxic WhatsApp group are rarely the most reliable narrators. Find a parent whose child is similar to yours and ask them honestly: does your kid feel known here?

Check the MySchool website data too if you feel so compelled. Just remember that a school’s improvement trend over time tells you far more about teaching quality than a raw year 7 NAPLAN score ever will.

What the research also tells us is that belonging is no soft extra – it is the engine of learning. Children who feel they belong learn more, persist longer and flourish further. Australia’s PISA results show that 30 per cent of our students don’t feel they belong at school. The problem sorting children by the financial means of their parents is that belonging is harder to build in a school that begins from a position of competitive self-selection.

You don’t engineer community from the top down. You find it when everyone is welcome.

In recent weeks, the Victorian and federal governments announced a deal to fully fund Victorian public schools. It was trumpeted as the biggest investment in public schools ever. Sounds awesome, eh?

What went less celebrated by the pollies is when that full funding arrives: 2034. A child starting year 7 today will have finished school before the money arrives. Victoria is currently the lowest-funded public school system in the country. Yet, just the promise to fix it depends on the result of a state election weeks away that the current government seems unlikely to win.

In NSW, government schools also won’t be fully funded until 2034.

The underfunding that has made parents anxious about public schools was not a verdict on their quality. It was a policy choice. Decades of funding decisions directed more public money, per student, to private schools than was required to meet their minimum schooling requirements as set out in the Gonski reforms. Meanwhile, public schools absorbed proportionally 2.4 times the number of disadvantaged students, 2.7 times the number of First Nations students and higher numbers of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

The perception gap between sectors worrying parents at kitchen tables wasn’t discovered by them. It was constructed.

Mark Morris and John Bush, co-convenors of Schools For All Australia, put it succinctly: “By continuing to under-resource public schools we have, as a nation, pushed parents to feel like better-resourced schools are a better choice. In many ways this is a false narrative.

When you choose your local public school, you’re also doing something that goes beyond your own child’s benefit. You are keeping that school strong for the kid next door whose parents don’t have the same options you do. Every family that leaves makes that school harder for the ones who stay. Every family that stays makes it stronger for everyone. That isn’t a guilt trip. That’s called citizenship.

Canada – our peer in prosperity and stability – sends 92 per cent of its children to public schools without suffering for it. What it has built, over generations, is a school system that functions as a piece of civil infrastructure, like a road or a hospital, but not a market.

Public schools are one of the few institutions left in Australian life where a child from a professional family sits next to a child from a working family, where differences aren’t filtered before these students connect.

This mixing isn’t a consolation prize of public education. It’s the point. A school sorted by wealth teaches children, day after day, that the world is made of people like them. The public school down the road teaches them the truth – and navigating that truth is what prepares a young person for adult life.

What’s a better question to ask when choosing a school? Not just: is this school good enough for my child? But: what kind of adult do I want my child to become – and which school is built for that?

The evidence suggests the answer, more often than the marketing implies, is the school at the end of your street.

Adam Voigt is a former principal, the founder and CEO of Real Schools and the author of new book The Truth About Student Behaviour.

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