Words Richard Eave, Images Sandra Herd 

Hats. There you have it. Charged with putting together an all-encompassing, in-depth look at the state of education in Western Australia, comparing and contrasting the schoolroom etiquette of this hot, red land with the comings and goings in schools in the UK, landing at a carefully considered conclusion as to which hemisphere offers the best for your brood, I can sum it all up in one word. Hats.

That’s it. Basically, yes it’s better down here, simply thanks to the hats.

I’m a dad. In that curmudgeonly mould. I like to sit in a chair, glare at the kids now and then and leave all the touchy-feely stuff to my lovely wife, occasionally offering a lifestyle tip such as ‘take off those bloody shoes in the house’ or ‘if you don’t keep the noise down you can go back to Britain and live with the smelly family at number 12’. But even I melted when our youngest appeared in the living room on her first day of primary bedecked in her gingham dress and bright yellow ranger hat.

Straight away, you know that you’re in a different country, a hot country, where skin cancer and its ilk are treated with such grave respect that the playground brigade are only allowed out if their fair skin is protected by a wide-brimmed chapeau. All very well and good for the worthy health reasons, but aesthetically the benefits of adding that little bit extra to your offspring’s cuteness factor are advantages that even a grumpy old dad can understand.

So, yes, come to Australia and stick your kids in its schools because then they get to wear cute hats. Job done.

Oh. You’re that funny breed who want more from education than nice photographs to send back to grandma are you? OK. If you must.

Truth is, then, that Australian education, West Australian in particular, is strong. It’s strong in the wonderfully old school way. It’s emotive and volatile, but its practitioners’ passion is comfortably reassuring. Out here, the teachers, like most workers of any flavour, take their jobs seriously and will illustrate that with loud, vocal, union-based protests. There’s few shrinking violets in the classrooms of WA. If they don’t like what’s going on, they’re going to make sure their paymasters in the State Government headquarters know all about.

Currently they’re irked by two issues: pay and the way they have to teach our little darlings. They want the whole nine yards, only thirty per cent extra over three years, smaller class sizes and the catch-all ‘better working conditions’ will quell their ire. And if you thought you’d seen militants in elbow-patched corduroy jackets at home courtesy of the NUT, this lot will show you how it should be done. One-day strikes are paired with mass protests outside Alan Carpenter’s Government headquarters, hundreds of spectacled educators wielding immaculately-punctuated placards making polite, but forceful points. Big Al’s not moving yet, but their commitment to the cause is evident and can’t help but give you confidence in their commitment to your kids.

Yes, there’s the nagging issue that, frankly, what with working days that end before tea time and holidays that turn up with surprising frequency and drag endlessly through the summer, they should be happier with their lot, but they assuage this by their passion for their work. For instance, another of their many grievances is a recent change in direction curriculum-wise. For years, they’ve been following the traditional British approach of books and learning, getting their charges to digest Romeo and Juliet and Stig of the Dump inside and out and then regurgitating it all in end-of-year exams. Now, though, they’ve been told the focus will be on ‘outcome-based education’. Apparently, the way we all did it was ‘input-based education’ and that, it seems, stifles the creativity of the next generation of Aussies. Concentrating on the outcome is the new way forward – and a direction I wish I’d been caught up in back in 1980s East Anglia. The brave new world sees pupils turning up for their exams without a care in the world, knowing that the papers will hold all the clues they need to get through. Basically, it’s questions such as ‘how do you feel about this?’ and ‘what does this picture make you think about?’. Lovely. Three years of smoking behind the bike sheds and trying to snog Amanda Curtis, then waltz into the exam hall and wing it. Would have suited me fine, thank you very much, and probably would have seen me into university after sixth form rather than behind the counter at Andy’s Records.

But, it transpires, a huge swathe of WA’s education establishment doesn’t like this ‘easy option’ – they’ve even started a pressure group, People Lobbying Against Outcomes – and the battle’s on to postpone, or even discard, the idea for next term. OK, so they’re tagging on the fact that the new direction will cause them more paperwork among their list of grievances, but the main thrust of their fury is that they don’t think it’s right for the kids. And if that’s their attitude, you can’t really knock ’em can you?

Still, there is one way of opting out of the whole outcome situation and that’s to put your little ones in a private school. I can feel the Guardian-reading lentil-eaters quivering even as I write that, but hang fire, Tarquin, things aren’t quite the same over here as they are back in Blighty.

Firstly, the private schools here are affordable, which means even the likes of me can have one of our own in a fee-paying classroom. Our oldest was enrolled in an Anglican establishment within a few days of landing in WA – a lucky break really because places are rare - they just happened to have one kicking about. Carrying on my tendency to wing things from my school years, we’d just presumed that we’d drop them all off at the nearest state school and that would be that, but things didn’t quite turn out that way.

Before I tell the story of that hectic few days of enrollment forms, I have to stress that state education standards in West Australia are high. Very high. They know what they’re doing, they’re committed to it and they do it well. But, like everywhere I suppose, there are a few bad apples – and as it turned out the high school on our doorstep was one of them. We first got jitters during the fresh-off-the-boat barbecue organised by friends and family within hours of us touching down at Perth International. The topic of schools came up, naturally, and all was big smiles and pats on the back when we relayed our plans to drop the youngest into the state primary down the road. But when the topic of the oldest’s education came up, the smiles turned into those sharp breath through the teeth expressions you’re more likely to experience when booking your motor in for a service.

“Ooh, you don’t want to send him there,” one stubby-clutching neighbour offered, eyeing number one son up and down. “They’ll eat him alive.

Nervous and suddenly aware that our new adventure down under could well be scuppered by troglodyte bullies ripping my boy apart, I sought the advice of the deputy headmistress who showed me around the beautiful little state primary the next day, prior to hat-clad daughter finding her peg and arranging her pink fluffy pencils. She told me her eldest wasn’t there, she was in the private school down the road. Now, if you want medical advice then you go to a doctor, if you want tips on education, listen to a teacher. We were on the phone as soon as we got home.

And there was a place and the fees, little more than seven hundred quid a term, were hardly Eton-levels. After all, state education here doesn’t come quite as cheap as it does in the UK. On enrolling, you’ll be presented with a list of things to buy – and it’s a long one. Parents here are entrusted with providing all the felt tips, blunt scissors and box files their offspring will require during the best days of their life, all itemised and available at the one laughing-all-the-way to the bank store, so we already knew that we’d be putting our hands in our pockets to some extent whatever avenue we went down. We agreed, then, to do the tour and at that point, we were won over.

I was state school all the way growing up in the UK, but my parents had the happy knack of living in towns where the quality of education was high. My middle school was referred to in the town as ‘a poor man’s prep school’, mainly due to its tough attitude to discipline, strong Christian ethics and a rigorously enforced uniform policy. And, lo and behold, what did I find nestled in the northern suburbs? A carbon copy of the place that had set me on my way, way back when I was but a nipper.

In fact, being in the oldest’s school can be a bit like slipping back into the 80s – but then a lot of life in WA is like that. But it’s the 80s with the good bits of post Y2K tagged on. All the children are immaculately dressed in identical school uniforms – even bags and shoes have a no-variance law overseeing them – and they hold doors open for you and stand up when a teacher enters a classroom, but the computer labs buzz with state-of-art PCs, the arts area is chock full of expensive equipment and the sports fields are happily clear of discarded pornography, funny men in sticky overcoats and discarded cans of Special Brew. It’s the way forward for us, excellent education standards and an opportunity to smugly represent a not-really-real affluence at dinner parties, but I have to repeat that there are perfectly good alternatives in the state sector too, full of worthy types who think ‘NO CAPITULATION’ is a punchy read for a protest placard.

To illustrate the point, I can’t speak highly enough of the littl’un’s primary. Yes, there’s the hat thing, but all in all there’s a feeling of happiness in the little school. At first glance, it all seems very similar to what we were used to back home – Britain remains the biggest cultural influence down here despite the country’s sudden growth – but look closer and you’ll see the difference. Actually, hang around for ten minutes after they’ve done the register and you’ll see the main one. Sports.

Our kids now seem to be running around in various ways for an extraordinarily large percentage of their school day. Within minutes, they’ll be out in the basketball court throwing bean bags to one another in an excited fashion or jogging up and down the field waving their arms. Yep, they do like their sports here. Happily, though, there’s no culture of leaving the weeds, nerds, speckies, gingers and weirdos on the sidelines. Yes, they love their successes in Oz, but they honestly embrace the idea that they’d rather everyone was joining in. Which is refreshing as in Blighty it always seemed to be more talk than anything else – witness the plethora of new and varied swearwords you’d learn standing on a wind-swept touchline for U12s six-a-side back in the Home Counties. Here, though, it’s more about making a good fist of cutting back on the obesity levels and having a laugh, which can’t be a bad thing.

Not that academia suffers. We did get a bit of a scare when, early on, the youngest told us that she loved her new school because ‘there’s lots less work and much more cutting out’, but our initial impressions are that our lot are at least going to grow up being able to spell and do long division. Languages play a big part, much to the eldest’s dismay. He’d never taken to French back home, so I chuckled a bit at his reaction when his form tutor informed him that he’d be studying Indonesian from now on. Why Indonesian, I’m not sure, what with China being sort of on our doorstep suggesting Mandarin might have been a better business option, but, hey, at least it’s not Latin. And, it turns out, your Indonesians don’t go in for tenses, so at least he doesn’t have to grapple with all the ‘mon, ma, mes’ nonsense anymore.

Other curriculum oddities include what’s nowadays known as humanities – history and geography to us traditionalists. But, you have to allow them this. For many years, apparently, youngsters in sun-baked Kimberley were learning about seed drills and crop rotation while committing the rivers of Aberdeenshire to memory, which does with hindsight seem to have been a bit of a waste of time. Nowadays, then, it’s all Murray Darling and tales of white Europeans slaughtering noble Aboriginals. This is, on the whole, a good thing, apart from that moment when it dawns on you that your 12-year-old knows more about the lay of the land than you do. Do you know the capital of the Northern Territory? Well, do you?

There are, as any Bill Bryson aficionado will appreciate, other, curious education routes on offer here, mainly the distance learning done over the wireless for the poor tykes who finish up on a sheep farm the size of Belgium. It’s a noble cause, but not one I’d advocate. That though, may be just the culture shock of it all. I’m still disregarding the enormity of Australia and happily living the delusion that perhaps we might drive to Melbourne at the weekend, so the idea of my kids being thousands of miles from their teacher doesn’t sit well. How’s he going to throw the chalk that far, for crying out loud? But, all in all, if you ask me the question ‘WA/UK, which is better for your kids’ education?’ you’ll get a quick answer. It’s WA all the way.

And that’s not just because I remain one of those disgruntled ‘fathers of hard-working families’ that had all his socialism kicked out of him by Blair and his buddies. And it’s not even just that sometimes you’d think that UK schools include a sheath knife on their stationery requirement list. It’s just that things are happier here, but the kids come out the other end knowing how to put a sentence together.

They can even take their academia to WA’s illustrious universities – Curtin, Edith Cowan, Notre Dame, Murdoch and the imaginatively monickered University of WA – where the eggheads on display are doing quite extraordinary work in realms such as medical research and the like, but that’s where I find myself digressing slightly from the cause of championing the chalkies over here. Perth, lovely as it is, is, as you’ll be told every couple of hours, the most remote city on the face of the planet, so, basically, I want my kids to get out a bit more. UCL did OK for my wife and Chris Martin, so I’m sending them there. Nightclubs are better too.