NSW’s fastest growing schools: Southwest and western Sydney see rapid increase in numbers
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New schools for Western Sydney suburbs with booming populations risk being overcrowded from the day they open, with existing primary schools already enrolling more kids than the maximum capacity of the proposed high schools nearby.
Over the last five years, families moving into Sydney’s northwest and southwest growth corridors have found themselves packed into a handful of primary schools and even fewer high schools, transforming them into the state’s most densely populated schools.
The Daily Telegraph can today reveal a full ranking of the state’s fastest growing schools based on federal government data, allowing parents to check if their child’s school population is rising or falling.
It shows schools in Sydney’s northwest suburbs of Gables, Marsden Park, Riverstone and Schofields more than doubled in size between 2018 and 2022, as did others in the southwest including in Spring Farm, Austral, Minto and Edmondson Park.
Santa Sophia Catholic Secondary College in Gables, which formally opened to students in 2021 but recorded a handful enrolments in 2018, became the fastest growing school in The Daily Telegraph’s analysis with an increase of nearly 2500 per cent.
St Bede’s Catholic College near Maitland also ranked high on the list, recording more than 500 per cent growth, while the Nature School in Port Macquarie grew by 440 per cent after expanding its offering to high school-aged students.
Four NSW schools which didn’t exist in 2018 now have more than 1000 students enrolled, including Gledswood Hills Public School, south of Leppington, and Northbourne Public School in Marsden Park where more than 1300 kids are putting the squeeze on families at drop-off and pick-up.
Local mum Stacey Thompson sent her kids, now in Years 3 and 6, to Northbourne when it first opened in 2021 but pulled them out this year due to the school’s overpopulation “nightmare”.
“I just couldn’t do it anymore, as there was just way too many people. It just got worse and will continue to get worse,” she said.
“I found that it really impacted (my children’s) learning as well as there was just too many students … so they were just shoved to the back to fend for them self and learn.”
The area’s first local high school, Melonba High, will open as a temporary facility next year and will eventually accommodate 2000 students, but all five new Western Sydney high schools pledged by Labor at the election will be at least half that size.
*Scroll to bottom for regional breakdowns of fastest growing schools.*
High schoolsfor the suburbs of Gledswood Hills/Gregory Hills, Tallawong/Schofields, Jordan Springs and Leppington/Denham Court were given 1000-student capacities in Parliamentary Budget Office costings, while the fifth, Melrose Park High School, was slated for 550.
The plans have raised eyebrows at the Centre for Western Sydney, where policy and strategy lead Tom Nance said families would have good reason to be concerned.
The government’s own population projections point to a significant increase in the number of school-aged children in the northwest and Macarthur regions by 2033, he said, with the 15-19-year-old demographic to grow by as much as 35.3 per cent in the Camden area alone.
“This will further stretch schools that are bursting at the seams, as they struggle to keep up with population growth,” Mr Nance said.
“After years of seeing their children being educated in demountable classrooms, parents in Western Sydney are rightly looking to the NSW Labor government to make progress in this area.
“We must ensure that we are building facilities today that will be able to accommodate the student population sizes of tomorrow.”
Gregory Hills mum Kate Laney, who now has two sons at the temporary Gregory Hills Public School having moved them away from demountable-ridden Gledswood Hills Public School, has been campaigning for years to get more school infrastructure in the area.
“We moved over here from an established area and … we just assumed, in our naivety, that (the school) would be ready by the time that our eldest was in primary school,” she said.
Instead, her eldest son Lucas spent his first year of primary school being driven an hour to Oran Park.
Ms Laney now faces the prospect of sending her son on a 45-minute bus ride to Mount Annan every day or forking out for a private school when Lucas graduates in 2025, a year before the new local high school will be ready.
“We’ve got overcrowding at all the local primary schools … I don’t think a 1000-student high school is enough, there’s so much more (house) building happening,” she said.
“If you’re going to go to the effort of building that one school, don’t build it too small, that’s a waste of our public funds. You’re basically throwing the money away.”
Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Mitchell accused the government of failing to plan for future growth by not allocating enough money for the right sized schools.
“To build high schools in growing areas with a maximum capacity of only 1000 students is completely shortsighted and will leave families in Western Sydney in the lurch,” she said.
“These schools will be overcrowded from day one.”
A spokesman for Education Minister Prue Car dismissed concerns about the size of the schools and said the government was “confident” in its plans.
“Fixing the previous government’s mess won’t happen overnight, but Labor is prioritising providing these communities with the schools they need, and masterplanning to factor in future growth,” he said.
“Our enrolment audit will inform better schools planning for growth areas and avoid a repeat of the former government’s mistakes.”
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