Page 1955 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2016
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The directorate understands that families may have made significant life decisions around property purchases on the basis of existing boundaries. As a consequence, priority enrolment area changes can take up to two years before enrolments are affected.
Priority enrolment area reviews are frequently commenced in conjunction with other strategies. By way of example, the priority enrolment area for Garran Primary School will be adjusted for 2017, with the suburb of O’Malley being removed from Garran’s enrolment area and placed within the enrolment area for Mawson Primary School. The directorate’s enrolment projections indicate that, based on this change and other influences, Garran can expect a softening of demand from 2018.
The final elements of the hierarchy of measures are for temporary or permanent increases in the capacity of a school. These options all require some level of capital expenditure and can include minor works such as removing walls, temporary buildings including transportable or modular buildings, permanent capacity increase, changing the structure of the school, and finally the construction of a new school.
I will give some examples. Gold Creek junior school has completed some internal works which have created additional space. Giralang Primary School is also using areas within the school as break-out spaces for small group teaching. Harrison School will be installing additional modular, relocatable buildings in the next year.
Parents and carers in the ACT should be assured that the ACT government is managing the projections of student enrolments in Canberra public schools to ensure that there will be a place for them should they choose it. The release of the enrolment projections for the 2017 and 2018 school years and 2016 school capacities shows that the government uses data to plan for increases or decreases in school populations as these occur. As members will be aware, the school census data and information about priority enrolment areas are published on the Education Directorate website.
Through its long-term planning processes and the application of strategies to proactively manage enrolment pressures, the Education Directorate is recognised for the high-quality, well-resourced and safe learning environments it provides to satisfy the current and future needs of the Canberra community.
I am pleased to be able to table these projections today and provide parents and carers across Canberra with more information. I hope that this gives greater certainty to parents that the government is planning for their children’s future schooling needs. I move:
That the Assembly take note of the paper.
MR DOSZPOT (Molonglo) (4.07): I thank Minister Rattenbury for presenting the information. I have not seen any pre-information on this, only what he has told us about in the chamber today. In my original motion I called for the figures for the years 2017, 2018 and 2019 to be presented. If I recall correctly, Mr Rattenbury agreed to present the figures for 2017 and 2018. Having said that, I thank him for presenting these figures.
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