“The department is supporting us, but there’s constant enrolment pressures with the development in the area,” Box Hill High principal Kellie Ind said.
In North Melbourne, the Arden precinct is due to house 20,000 new residents by the middle of the century. The state government has committed to building a new primary school in the area, but its opening could still be years away.
The nearby Kensington Primary School has 420 students and has not yet reached capacity, but school council president David Frazer says the school only has room for a maximum of two more classes, which he expects will be needed soon.
“There’s an inevitability that’s going to happen,” he said. “We love our community, but it keeps getting bigger and we don’t have a lot of room.”
When the school council approached the department about an opportunity to buy nearby land to expand the school, Frazer said he was told “it’s a categorical no” because the school wasn’t yet at capacity.
“We’re finding the government is looking at this very much in the immediate,” he said. “But for us, buying the land is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because, of course, our school is completely locked in by housing.”
In 2021, the state government allocated $7.3 million to the school to renovate and modernise the buildings. Renovations were undertaken until last year, but rising construction costs have meant resolving accessibility issues, an expansion to rooms that could become classrooms, and repairs to rotten windowsills are still incomplete.
“We’ve literally got rooms in our school at the moment that we can’t use, and the population is growing,” Frazer said. “If the future is apartments in semi-low rise we can absolutely accommodate that. We just need to make sure schools can cope with the increase as well.”
Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell, whose electorate takes in Kensington, said the school was in a bind because it wasn’t able to improve the available space or expand its footprint.
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“It’s a failure of governments to plan for the medium and long term,” Sandell said. “Kensington won’t be able to put in more portables because there’s only limited space to play, and the population of the area is absolutely booming.”
Other nearby schools are already straining to accommodate students. University High this year moved all of its year 9 students to a temporary campus using two floors of an office building in Lonsdale Street. In 2023, Docklands Primary opened a second campus for students in the District Docklands shopping centre to accommodate surging enrolments.
Education Department secretary Tony Bates told a public accounts and estimates committee last week that he was aware of the pressures on schools in the inner west. He pointed out North Melbourne Primary had opened a new campus in 2023.
“The population growth has exploded unlike anything we had seen before,” Bates said. “The number of families with small children living in high-rises is far exceeding normal predictions and patterns.”
In this year’s state budget, the government allocated $1 million to identify sites for new schools in areas experiencing population growth and $411 million for new and expanded schools. It is acquiring land for schools in Arden and in the Darebin, Casey and Melton council areas.
Education Minister Ben Carroll said the new school in Arden would add to the 123 new schools in Victoria, “19 of which we are opening next year in growth suburbs like Clyde North, Kalkallo and Cobblebank, one in Geelong and another in Wodonga”.
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