Page 1621 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 19 May 1993
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team sports. Two or three remain, I believe. That is what we have done. We have not abandoned team sport. You can go to a school and see your team sports, as is proper in terms of what the school decides ought to happen. I just wanted to correct that.
The MPI makes a basic assumption that I do not think is correct. It assumes that we have space that is not utilised; that we are carrying - that was the word Mr Cornwell used - this enormous load. The fact is that space is well used in schools. Go to the schools and have a look around. I believe that all schools fully utilise their space. The ACT school system, going back many years, given our urban design in Canberra, has planned a school to be a building that is used. Ms Ellis will say something about that because it is very relevant to some of the work that she is doing. Our schools are planned to be useful, and indeed, they are. They become part of the suburb. There was a time in earlier days when we had very large schools in relatively small suburbs, small in geographic size. Given the population trends of 20 and 30 years ago, there were certainly large numbers of children in those suburbs. But we had large schools.
Go to Turner, for example, and look at that very large school. The suburb itself is rather small. The school was built grandly, as everything in the Federal capital was at that time. It is a wonderful building. It had everything you would need - halls and so on. It was built all in one go. There were demountables there at some stage to cater for an excess of students. North Ainslie, I would think, in years gone by, catered for well over 1,000 students. I would like to check my figures on that. Mr Kaine, I thought, made the - - -
Mr Cornwell: Its original built capacity was 730.
MR WOOD: Yes. Then it had demountables, but 730 was the built capacity. We do not build schools today with a built capacity that high. I think the record has shown that that has left us with rather large buildings. Today we are building for a smaller core, perhaps 400 or so, perhaps even less than that, and that will grow with demountables. They are planned to accommodate those demountables.
Mr Cornwell got onto the argument about the schools in the Tuggeranong Valley - shock, horror - having 750 students or something. Mr Cornwell has been around Canberra and in education for a long time. Most of the schools in Canberra, certainly those earlier schools that I mentioned, had students in excess of that number. There is absolutely nothing unusual about schools having that number of students. It is one of the problems imposed on us by the nature of planning and development in the ACT that suburbs develop rather rapidly. You get the nappy valley syndrome, if you like, where development all goes on in one place at one time. Most of our schools moved fairly rapidly to substantial numbers and then they reduced in numbers. In terms of what Mr Cornwell's MPI would suggest, our planning caters for that, because we build that basic core to accommodate a smaller number of students. Those schools will accommodate 750, and I have no difficulty with that. That is fine and sensible, and I do not think it is a large school. Perhaps I am prejudiced because I had a brilliant eduction at a school of over 1,000 students all the time I was there. I have said before in this Assembly - to divert for a minute - that the size of the school does not determine the quality. Quality is determined by those things I was talking about before, by what the students do in the school. That is what makes the quality of the school, not the size. You can have a very small school that is terrific and a very large school that is terrific.
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