Inner city families deserve a clear plan for high school

In the past month, I’ve had the privilege of visiting some of our inner-city public schools – including University High’s city campus, North Melbourne Primary, and Docklands Primary.

These schools are doing incredible work in the heart of our city, despite facing growing challenges.

More and more families are choosing to raise their children in the CBD and surrounding suburbs, but our public education system hasn’t caught up. Overcrowding is already a reality in schools like Docklands Primary and University High, and enrolment pressure is getting worse because successive state governments have not planned well for inner-city schools.

Unfortunately, the Victorian Labor Government is failing to plan ahead for the rapid growth we’re seeing across the inner city. Instead of building schools before they’re needed, they consistently wait until classrooms are overflowing and then step in with temporary solutions.

The recent State Budget included funding to buy land for a new high school in inner Melbourne. That’s a positive step, and something I’ve been lobbying for, but many questions remain …

Where will the school go and how many students will it accommodate? Will the new school help to alleviate pressure on University High or will it be too late by the time it is built? This is particularly important because the budget doesn’t actually include any money to build the school – yet.

The government has said the land will be purchased to service the areas of Docklands, Parkville, North Melbourne and Arden – but stopped short of saying it will explicitly be in the Arden precinct.

It’s also unclear why the government needs to buy land, when they already own land in the Arden area. Are they planning to give this land over to developers only to have to buy it back again for a school, like what happened in Docklands?

Arden will eventually be home to around 30,000 residents, and yet there’s only one primary school planned. A high school is desperately needed for these residents, but also for the residents in surrounding suburbs who are already seeing their schools, like Uni High, bursting at the seams.

We should be planning now for the schools we’ll need in five, 10 or 20 years’ time, not scrambling to retrofit solutions once a crisis hits.

I’ll keep working with local school communities and advocating for long-term school planning that’s independent of pork-barrelling at election time – to make sure that our public schools meet the needs of inner-city families now and into the future. •

Caption: State Greens MP for Melbourne Ellen Sandell at University High School’s new city campus.