Moreland high schools: Oak Park Primary School parents call for better secondary schools

Parents in Melbourne’s north are demanding better high school options for their students, with fears the area is being “left behind”.

Parents in Melbourne’s north hope to encourage a future government to invest in a new high school in their region. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Nikki Short

Angry parents in Melbourne’s north fear the schooling on offer is not up to standard.

Oak Park Primary School parents Kate Mangion and Mabrooka Singh said they felt as though Moreland had been “left behind,” and pointed to significant flaws in local schools as a reason parents were leaving for better catchment areas.

“It’s the first thing parents begin talking about in kinder — ‘where are we going to send our kids when they reach senior school?’” Ms Mangion said.

Ms Mangion, who has three children at Oak Park, set up the group Different Secondary School Options in the North, with fellow parent Mabrooka Singh.

Ms Mangion and Ms Singh set up the group after deciding that the two public high schools their children were eligible for, a single-sex girls school and another high school dominated by male students, were unsatisfactory.

They said that Pascoe Vale Girls School, a single-sex secondary school, was no longer an educational choice favoured by most parents,an assessment they said was backed up by the latest My School data.

According to My School data, attendance at Pascoe Vale Girls School has declined by more than 300 students, from 1268 to 908, from 2014 to 2021.

“The current options are not what the public want,” Ms Mangion said.

Glenroy Secondary College, the second of three public high school accessible to residents of Oak Park, Glenroy, Pascoe Vale and Hadfield, has its own issue: a disproportionate number of male students to female students.

My School data shows that 66 per cent of Glenroy’s students are boys.

Ms Mangion and Ms Singh said the third high school accessible in the area, Strathmore, has a more insoluble problem than the others, in that it can only be accessed by residents of two streets falling just within the catchment zone.

“Already parents are beginning to lose sleep about it,” Ms Mangion said.

“We feel as though there is just no plan for us.”

The Department of Education and Training and the Education Minister was contacted for comment.