Inner city high school consultation finishes

Inner city high school consultation finishes
Image: Alex Greenwich at a community consultation. Source: alexgreenwich.com

As the deadline for community consultation on the inner Sydney schools proposal passes, the Department of Education and Communities (DEC) has received a flurry of offline and online submissions.

According to action group CLOSE (Community for Local Options for Secondary Education), one parent argued at a June 19 community consultation the DEC “needs to wake up and realise that the inner city demographic had changed and we need a high school that reflects this – not boundary changes, not bussing kids, not filling up spaces in far flung schools”.

“More and more children are living in the inner city, but there is no public high school. Census data shows this trend is increasing and there will be more students in future,” Sydney MP and champion for an inner city high school Alex Greenwich said.

NSW Minister for Education Adrian Piccoli said that in the short-medium term, schools are prepared for higher enrolments.

“The Departments’ current analysis of the projected population growth in the area indicates that the secondary schools across the inner city have sufficient capacity for the projected student enrolments in the medium-term.”

The DEC noted a surplus of 83 classrooms in public secondary schools in the Sydney area, and that building a new school would take a minimum of four years. However, they noted the uneven distribution of spare classrooms compared to where new students would be living.

Conducting the consultations is the Inner City Schools Working Party, a body announced in late 2012 to assist in the ongoing review of primary and secondary public education in inner Sydney.

The DEC also encouraged online discussions on the submission website, calling for submissions on public secondary education needs in the short, medium and long term – a time frame of up to a decade.

Even the small amount of contributors evidenced a clear divergence of opinions regarding the future of Sydney’s schools.

Parents and community members seemed uniformly committed to the notion of a new inner city high school. However, disagreement raged over short-term solutions such as demountable classrooms and temporarily shifting local intake boundaries.

Alexandria Park Community School Parents and Citizens President Leanne Sneddon said that long term capacity building must be accompanied by short-term revitalisation.

“Those of us who live locally have all seen the explosion in the number of kids in the inner city area,” Ms Sneddon said.

“There is no doubt a need for a new high school to service the area’s growing population but at the same time there is a need for the existing schools to both be embraced by the local community and brought up to 21st century learning space standards by the Department of Education.”

The DEC’s response to questions regarding the expansion-revitalisation nexus was that “doing more with what we have is important [but] any redevelopment would have to increase public secondary capacity and deliver significant improved teaching and learning facilities”.

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