Haileybury pushes ahead with international project as Aboriginal intake sputters

ELITE private school Haileybury Rendall is forging ahead with plans to build an international boarding house but its Indigenous student intake remains short of targets

Haileybury Rendall School principal Craig Glass, pictured with students Elonea Pascoe, Matthew Larkin Max Parkes and Charley Parkes, has outlined an agressive plan for school expansion by 2021. Picture: Keri Megelus

ELITE private school Haileybury Rendall is forging ahead with plans to build an international boarding house on its grounds at Berrimah.

Preparations for the facility are now under way, with the school aiming to recruit about 50 students from Southeast Asia and China for a 2021 opening. Haileybury already has deep roots in China, with a 600-student campus on the outskirts of Beijing.

The plans are the latest example of an ambitious growth plan from school principal Craig Glass.

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“The number one thing we have to do is grow the school,” Mr Glass said.

“All indications are we will continue to grow – we think it’s quite a remarkable story.”

Haileybury has almost doubled its student population since taking over from Kormilda College at the end of 2017.

The school currently has 580 students enrolled, and is eyeing 700 by 2020 and up to 900 by 2021.

“Hopefully in another couple of years we will be right up there with where we want to be,” Mr Glass said.

That same vigour for rapid growth, however, will not be applied to the school’s boarding house for indigenous students. Dormitories built for Aboriginal students at the school and subsidised by the NT Government in 2016 remain vacant, with the school 94 students short of its Aboriginal student enrolment target. Haileybury Rendall will introduce 22 new indigenous students to the boarding house next term, bringing total enrolments to 88.

At its peak level, Kormilda College housed 230 students in the same boarding house.

While the school has taken political heat for circumspect growth in indigenous student intake, Mr Glass said the school would set its own timeline for increasing enrolment numbers.

“We are determined to grow our enrolment numbers in a way that manages the welfare of our boarding students,” he said. Since the closure of Kormilda College and Woolaning Homeland Christian College in late 2017, some 180 indigenous boarding school places have been cut from the Territory’s education system.

Education Minister Selena Uibo said Haileybury should be striving to return Aboriginal boarders to previous numbers.

“Our priority as a Government is that families and students have the ultimate say in how and where their children are educated, to increase their chances of succeeding in school,” she said.

Indigenous education experts, meanwhile, say the provision of secondary education in the NT is inadequate and getting worse.

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“If they’re going to take away places from boarding in the NT, more needs to be done to provide secondary education options for kids,” the Batchelor Institute’s education research leader Dr John Guenther said.

“With less boarding school places those kids have less options now, and sometimes no option at all.”