My daughter’s school is a CBD office building. Most kids don’t get outside all day

The Victorian education department announced late last year that the entire year 9 cohort of University High School was to be moved into a new “campus” in the Melbourne CBD. This “safe and fit for purpose environment” would provide an “outstanding, standalone city-based educational experience”, one whose classrooms were “filled with natural light through floor-to-ceiling windows with city views”. From a parent’s perspective, it sounded magnificent.

This “campus” is actually the 6th and 7th floor of an office building in Lonsdale Street, and has no open-air spaces, no canteen, no windows that open. It’s just office space divided into fluorescent-lit classrooms, some with no external windows. The “library” is a single bookshelf and there is nowhere to sit. There are no Bunsen burners or other built-in equipment in the science rooms. There’s no PA system, school bell, or lockers large enough for school bags. The “recreation” spaces (indoor, of course) don’t allow for physical recreation – too crowded. The nearest safe outdoor space is three blocks away. It’s absurd.

University High School’s Year 9 campus is on busy Lonsdale Street. Credit: Luis Ascui

The department is “continuing to explore longer-term options for additional secondary school facilities”, an admission that the current arrangement is lacking. But it has refused to answer detailed questions about how this was considered a feasible solution for 300 teenagers. How did it get to this?

The short version is that University High became too crowded, being the only state secondary school in a massive catchment that includes the CBD, North Melbourne, Parkville, Docklands, West Melbourne and much of Carlton. Of course they ran out of space. But the real issue is the degradation of the entire public school system and lack of planning.

The problem’s not confined to this catchment, or state, either. And it was predictable. “The growth we’re now witnessing in inner Melbourne and Sydney is the result of a “mini” baby boom that occurred around 2006,” wrote a 2016 Grattan Institute report. “As night follows day, primary school children become secondary school children, so from 2018 onwards we know that secondary schools in those areas will become increasingly crowded unless new schools come online.” This is exactly what has come to pass. But while the feeder schools to Uni High have become over-populated, no new secondary schools were established.

The music room doesn’t inspire.

The year 9s aren’t able to go outside at recess time. There’s not enough time to get to the park and back, so they’re stuck on the 6th floor. If kids want to go outside at lunchtime, they need to be signed out, and their trek to the park must be accompanied by teachers – with staffing constraints meaning that a maximum of 100 students can go each day. The majority of the kids spend both recess and lunchtime in the same airless spaces that they spend the rest of the school day. God help their teachers in the afternoon.

An Australian Education Union report released in February revealed that just 1.3 per cent of public schools are adequately funded. Whereas 98 per cent of private schools are over-funded, according to the broadly accepted Schooling Resource Standard (SRS).

The SRS measure was a key plank in the Gonski funding model, announced in 2012 and designed to address socioeconomic disadvantage. Unfortunately, state and federal governments have failed to implement it, refusing to pull funding from private schools, or to find the budgets to fund public schools properly. In fact, the inequality gap widened in the decade following the Gonski report: state and federal funding for private schools grew at almost twice the rate of public schools.

An entire cohort of students has gone from kindergarten to year 12 without receiving adequate resources since then, and the underfunding of public schools nationally is set to continue until at least 2034. That’s three federal governments away, assuming each one holds to the plan laid out by Education Minister Jason Clare. How likely is this? In the meantime, state schools will fall billions of dollars further behind.

The campus has the appearance of an office.

Parents were recently invited to see the new Lonsdale Street “campus” for themselves. At an information session afterwards, the heat started to rise, and it wasn’t just from the poor ventilation. Parents were concerned about the lack of activity their kids were getting. Mothers of rowdy boys described how they used to play sports every possible spare moment, but now played none. Others wondered how their kids had been allocated to classrooms without any windows or natural light. Could they go onto the roof of the building? No.

How could children participate in lunchtime clubs and bands? Would they be able to join the school musical? There were many, many questions.

The school and especially the hard-working teachers are not to blame. By all reports, they are trying valiantly. The problem is statewide, and nationwide.

State school parents across Australia have their own stories of ridiculous under-resourcing. Parents fund-raising for soap. Cake-stalls for basic library books. Teachers buying their own textbooks and stationery for their classes. Classrooms not large enough for all students to sit at desks at the same time.

One Melbourne private school boasts a 500-seat auditorium, a secondary hall with pipe organ, 400-seat drama theatre, four art studios, heated pool, diving pool, badminton courts, squash courts, gymnasium, rowing sheds, 26 tennis courts, seven ovals, and a seaside camp.

Surely a breath of fresh air each day isn’t too much to ask.

Nick Feik is a writer and investigative journalist, and former editor of The Monthly magazine.

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