The lack of planning and foresight to cope with the never-ending population (immigration) deluge into Australia’s big cities never ceases to amaze. Over the past year or so, we have received numerous reports about overcrowding across schools in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, as well as other collateral damage including worsening traffic congestion, crush-loaded public transport, and deteriorating housing affordability.
The story with respect to schools is always the same: the explosion in the number of high-rise apartments and fringe houses across our major capitals is dramatically driving up student enrolments, resulting in “jam-packed” public schools.
Last month, we got yet another taste of this dysfunctional population ponzi in action, with Fairfax reporting that public schools are being squeezed by surging enrolments at the same time as the number of government schools around Australia declines:
Government schools’ share of student enrolments rose to 65.6 per cent in 2017, up from 65.4 per cent in 2016 and 65.1 per cent in 2014…
But at the same time, the number of public schools in Australia has fallen. There were 58 fewer government schools in 2017 than in 2012 – in that period, NSW lost 18 public schools, Victoria 10 and Queensland five. In the same period, the number of students enrolled at NSW public schools rose by 70,000, and in Victoria by 85,000.
State governments have been accommodating the rising numbers of public school students in demountable classrooms, with the use of demountables forecast to double in NSW and Education Minister Rob Stokes declaring the makeshift classrooms are “here to stay”…
So at the same time as the federal government is flooding Australia’s cities with 200,000-plus migrants a year, as well as relaxing visa rules to allow 6 year-old foreign students and their guardians visa entry into Australia’s primary schools, the number of public schools across Australia has declined! You can’t make this stuff up.
On Wednesday, 9News Sydney ran the below segment on the planned sale of a school site near the airport in the suburb of Turrella, which was to be sold to a developer for $15 million to build high-rise apartments. This comes despite local schools in the area bursting at the seams and the area designated a “priority precinct”, which means they are earmarked for mass rezonings and high-rise development, with 10,000 new homes expected and at least 400 extra school students.
Thankfully, due to intense pressure from the community and 9News, the NSW Government this week back flipped on the sale and has promised to retain the site for future school use. Nevertheless, it does highlight the idiocy within the NSW State Government, who seem to not understand planning 101 and the stupidity of shutting down schools when population (and student) growth in exploding, and projected to do so for decades.
Remember, the State Government’s own forecasts have Sydney’s population ballooning by 1.74 million over the next 20-years on the back of a 1.53 million increase in net overseas migration:
And according to Peter Goss, School Education Program Director at the Grattan Institute, NSW will require an additional 213 new schools in the decade to 2026 merely to keep pace with the projected 175,000 increase in student enrolments:
Where is the schools investment required to keep pace with the population influx?
This is planning 101, and the NSW Government is failing dismally.
