For parents who have the relative luxury of choice in these matters, the question is a vexed one.
Finding the right school for your child is an emotional decision, clouded by prejudice, guilt and hope, distorted by wealth and peer group and the carefully curated aura of private school reputations. In a country that still wants to think of itself as egalitarian, evidence of the growing disparity between Australia’s richest and poorest schools has politicised it too.
But parents want to do the best they can for their children. Lured by the ever-more luxurious facilities of private schools, the smorgasbord of extracurricular activities, the boaters and blazers, the solid feeling of generations of institutional history; some are captive to the idea they are doing children a disservice by sending them to the more modest local public school – particularly in high school, where these decisions seem to bite harder.