Virtual school opens remote opportunies

A VIRTUAL high school will be established for students living in rural areas in NSW to ensure they're offered a subject range.

A VIRTUAL high school will be established for students living in rural areas in NSW to ensure they are offered the same wide range of subjects up to Year 12 that is available to city students.

The virtual school, to start in 2015, will operate alongside bricks-and-mortar schools as an adjunct to existing classrooms rather than replacing regular education, and will also offer selective classes for bright children.

The $8 million initiative is one of the main measures outlined in the state government's $80m rural and remote education strategy, released yesterday, that includes $30m across four years for incentives to attract teachers to remote schools and an extra $5m to build new preschools.

The strategy also encourages clusters of schools to form "education networks" and share resources, including teachers and budgets, across groups of schools.

All initiatives will be evaluated across 10 years to monitor the effectiveness of the plan and ensure it is improving student results.

NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli, who launched the plan in Tamworth, 420km north of Sydney, said many remote schools were small and lacked the teachers and resources to offer high-level subjects at Year 12.

"It's a fairness issue that kids in country schools have the same opportunities as kids in city schools, to have really good teachers standing in front of them and the same subjects available at a school in Condobolin (465km northwest of Sydney) as in Parramatta," Mr Piccoli said.

"A lot of kids live in communities where it's sometimes hard to get police officers or nurses to work because there's not the broad curriculum . . . families move towns so their kids can access particular subjects.

"And even high-performing students in the country don't go to university at the same rate as in metropolitan areas."

Mr Piccoli said video-conferencing facilities already in schools enabled specialist teachers to be beamed in to country classrooms. A virtual selective high school already operates in western NSW for bright students in years 7-10. The new virtual school will run from years 7 to 12 across the state for all students, with some selective classes.

The head of a review of indigenous education in the Northern Territory, Bruce Wilson, said last week that remote schools had "universally failed" in providing high school education.