After a lazy summer, school is back. So is the juggle – and an important piece of cardboard

It’s back. After a largely dormant summer, the family calendar is once again at the centre of our household.

Multicoloured ink fills each family member’s column with times, places, appointments, parties, sports training sessions and matches, early starts, late finishes, excursions, camps, swimming days – and on it goes.

The family calendar is once again at the centre of our household.Credit: Getty

Like many households, we are getting back into the swing of school and that means a half-square metre of cardboard is again ruling my life and backstopping my highly questionable memory.

With four kids across two schools, I certainly can’t afford to leave things to my recall.

This week, there’s been netball training (coaching the year threes is a highlight of my week), football pre-season training (mercifully cancelled due to the heat), a costume to be organised for an assembly performance (which I’ll miss unfortunately due to work) and tennis practice. Plus my wife attended two parent-teacher meetings.

As it is with many families, two working parents mean it’s a divide-and-conquer enterprise, but the reality is my wife does the logistical lion’s share while I’m working in the city.

I swing the drop-offs but she makes the lunches, does the pick-ups, administers the uniforms, the post-school wash-up and a great many things I’m sure I never even see.

But maths homework is one of my patches. I’ve spent a couple of nights this week immersed in the year-10 maths curriculum with my son (re?)learning index laws.

This is not a complaint – it’s terrific to have active, enterprising kids. We are so lucky to have access to great schools and all the activities around them.

But it’s clear this roiling term-time pot is a shared experience for so many of our subscribers, going by your keen interest in the stories from our newly expanded education team of editor Noel Towell, and reporters Alex Crowe, Caroline Schelle, Bridie Smith, Nicole Precel and Daniella White.

A couple of our best-read stories this week came from the education team, including this one from Towell on how schools might tackle a surge in aggressive behaviour from parents, and then White’s story on the low and mid-fee private schools that are producing strong results.

We know education matters immensely, not just for those directly involved in it but for our society generally. That means The Age needs to cover it broadly, from Commonwealth funding to individual schools trying something new, pedagogical debates (such as the use of phonics) and safety risks.

The Age has been doing this for a long time.

One lovely back-to-school story we covered this year came from Crowe, who caught up with three sets of twins who started school on the same day 10 years ago and were featured in a photograph in The Age. Here they are photographed by Penny Stephens in 2014 and last week by Simon Schluter.

It’s a nice reminder that we want to be there for the journey right through school with parents, students and teachers.

Our popular annual VCE blog is a whole-of-newsroom effort that recognises this is a major event in the lives of so many young Victorians and their families.

We know readers are hungry for information to inform their decisions. That’s why when the NAPLAN results came out, we put substantial effort into producing accessible data about schools.

The Age has also sought to do more considered reporting on schools doing well beyond the scores used on billboards and press releases.

There is no better example of this than the Schools that Excel series where we seek out and recognise schools that have improved or are punching above their weight.

This series will run again later this year so keep an eye out, it always spotlights impressive school leaders and students.

We also hope to run The Age Schools Summit again, which brings together leading minds to discuss where education is headed and where we want it to go.

I had the pleasure of opening last year’s event and it was clear the sector looks to The Age to help provide a forum for those discussions. It’s a role we relish.

I’ll finish by saluting all the parents, kids, teachers and everybody else wrestling their way through school. It’s a different experience for each of us, but we will be there to tell your stories and bring you the information you need.

Meanwhile, good luck with the juggle.

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