Page 4310 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 7 December 1993
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Sporting and other community groups also came before the committee, both in written form and in evidence to the public hearing. The majority of the written submissions identified schools as central to their local communities. They emphasised the role of schools in facilitating sporting activities, and the associated social and recreational benefits which they believed would flow to the community as a result. There was critical comment on the level of success experienced by many of these groups in their attempted use of some of the school facilities. Overwhelmingly, I think, they believed that a direct system which would operate between the hirer or the hiring group and the school community itself would be far better than the current arrangements. Chapter 3 of the report goes into some detail on this aspect of the inquiry and I will not belabour the point or waste time by going into that any further at this stage.
A great amount of detail was submitted to our inquiry by the Department of Education and Training. I want to record the thanks of the committee to the officers concerned for the time taken in briefing the committee privately, attending the public hearings, putting written submissions before us, and supplying a fairly large amount of additional information later on in our process, particularly a lot of the statistical information that appears in the report. The Department of the Environment, Land and Planning also contributed extensively to our process, especially when we were looking at future planning of schools and community facilities. Although we may not have predicted it at the outset, because of the sorts of comments that we were getting about the advantages that people could perceive from well-planned community and school facilities complementary to each other, we inevitably found ourselves talking to the social planners and planners in general from DELP. They were of great assistance to us in helping us come to grips with that aspect of the inquiry.
I think it is fair to say that our major conclusions were fairly simple, but many recommendations followed. There seems to be little doubt that the current system of centre school bookings within regions throughout the Territory by community groups does not work as well as it should, or as well as it may have been foreseen that it could. It does not appear to promote the view of schools that seems to be held by most of the people in our community. The comment often made to us during the inquiry, by a wide range of people, was, "We certainly see our community schools as an integral part of our community". They did not believe that the centre school booking system promoted that. In fact, in some cases, it demoted that view. It was pointed out to us that schools that were fortunate enough to be a centre school in fact became an advantaged school. The activities in and around that school were certainly of great advantage to the community there. The schools that were missing out in terms of not having that promotional activity in and around them were seemingly at a disadvantage.
The inquiry turned out to be fairly complicated and statistically driven. We have attempted - I think we have achieved our goal - to detail the current situation; to outline how the school community or school communities, the sporting, cultural and community groups that are users, and individuals who may wish to hold a public meeting or such at some time, really see the system and whether it is working well or failing them. We have set out what we should consider if we wish to take all of those points on board and improve the system somehow. We have come down with a set of recommendations, a fairly strong
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