Education minister Rob Stokes outlines plans for ‘dozens’ of new schools

NEW Education Minister Rob Stokes has vowed to build at least a dozen public schools a year to accommodate an anticipated 1.8 million children.

NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes visits pupils at Mona Vale Public School yesterday. Picture: Tim Hunter

NEW Education Minister Rob Stokes has vowed to build at least one dozen public schools a year into the future to accommodate an anticipated 1.8 million children aged under 15 in our state by 2036.

Mr Stokes says one of his key jobs is to build the schools of the future.

Ironically, Mr Stokes’ former primary school — Gordon Public — was shut the last time there was a Liberal education minister as part of the controversial Terry Metherell government school closures in the late 1980s.

Rob Stokes checks in on new kindergarten kids: “Having more children in our state is not a bad thing, it’s a great thing.” Picture: Tim Hunter

“It’s now a school that I wish we could reopen,” Mr Stokes told The Saturday Telegraph in his first interview since taking on the portfolio. “It’s not possible anymore because there’s a bunch of units (there).”

Under Mr Stokes’ plan, primary and secondary schools will be built in the growth areas and also in existing communities. Mr Stokes said there would be more schools similar to Parramatta’s new Arthur Phillip High, where schools are built vertically with less “rolling fields”.

But the minister says he hopes to increase “shared use” facilities, where local councils and schools share oval space. To make this happen, he will release a draft new State Environmental Planning Policy on Monday. The SEPP will allow more uses on school grounds without the requirement for development consent, quicker approvals for schools and more capacity for preschools and childcare centres to be built on school sites.

“Land is very expensive so we’ve got to be efficient … and we’ve got to be creative.”

And new public and private schools will be approved by the Planning Department — not local councils.

“Having more children in our state is not a bad thing, it’s a great thing and I want to embrace the challenge of providing more schools for them,” Mr Stokes told The Saturday Telegraph.

“Our population is going to increase 28 per cent in the next 20 years. We’re going to have 1.8 million people aged 15 and under by 2036 and over that same time our enrolments are going to ­increase by about 25 per cent. So we need a dozen more schools a year into the foreseeable future.”

He said NSW had to be “smarter in the way we develop schools”.

“We can’t just cloister them away sort of like the old model of the 1960s,” he said. “Land is very expensive so we’ve got to be efficient … and we’ve got to be creative.

Art: Daily Telegraph

“Obviously schools need to be safe but … often students are only there for a few hours a day yet we have local councils that need to provide sporting facilities for their local communities.

“Why can’t we look at ways to double that investment and get a bigger bang for our buck and have use of sporting fields on weekends by the community?”

Mr Stokes said he wanted to see more classrooms used for after-school care and he wanted to make it “easier to build early childhood centres and preschools” on school sites.

NSW education minister Rob Stokes in 1982 at Gordon Public School.

“We know one of the best ways we can get great teaching outcomes is by having kids better prepared when they arrive for school.
So we need more preschools to do that. By 2036 we’re going to have an extra 600,000 kids five and under so we’re going to need a lot more preschools, plus we already have a deficit in the number of preschools.”

He also said good design of schools meant airconditioning would become “cheaper to provide”.

Flagging some “playgrounds on rooftops”, Mr Stokes said “it may be in some settings there won’t be the rolling fields of the past around schools”.

The draft planning policy predicts 172,000 new students by 2031.

“To meet this demand, NSW will need to build 15 new schools a year and refurbish or replace a further one-third of school assets that will be in poor condition or worse by 2031,” it says.

Mr Stokes’ rhetoric matches Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s commitment to use some of the proceeds from the sale of the electricity “poles and wires” towards “local infrastructure”.

He has already spoken with federal counterpart Simon Birmingham to make it clear NSW expected to receive the $1.2 billion in Gonski funding over the next two years that federal Labor had promised and it was yet to get.

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