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| The red dots are established schools with entry caps on them and the black dots are special entry schools. |
Where we live, in the suburbs of Northern Melbourne there is " a black hole" of secondary schools. That is, there are about 3 high schools supporting a broad area of the northern suburbs, and this year yet another high school has been closed down.
• There is not one open-entry Secondary School in the area
• There are 22 primary schools in the area
• Families are are moving away from Coburg to get access to a secondary school for their children
• Children graduating from primary schools are being split up into many different secondary schools
• The Moreland Community Survey showed “lack of schools" was number 5 of the top 10 issues.
• Under the “Coburg 20/20” plan, there will be 5000 new homes in the area (not the including Kodak and Pentridge developements)
• Coburg and Pentridge developments are bringing many new families into the area
• There has been a 20% increase in birthrate across the city of Moreland placing future pressure on schools
As you will see this is no small problem, but one which needs to be addressed soon.
My own son attends a school which is some 5 kms, or 2 bus rides away. He travels on 2 buses for about an hour every morning and afternoon, to get to and from school.
Where he went to school in Coburg, there was originally a High school across the road from his primary school but that has long since been closed down and pulled down. There is a school in the next suburb to ours but it is capped and we live outside the region they will accept students from.
Not far from us their is a large area which will soon be subdivided and new estates and new families will start to move in. They will have problems educating their children though because there are no high schools.
We will soon face an election and I have yet to see any of the political parties stand up and take notice of this growing problem. Recently I have been introduced to a group known as
who are a group of local parents in the same situation.
http://www.highschoolforcoburg.org/p/about-hsc.html
If this is of interest to you also, perhaps you are a teacher or a parent or you know someone who lives in the area or perhaps you just feel strongly about the importance of educating our kids have a look at the link above and sign their petition. Or just have a read.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/highschoolforcoburg/
Can you explain how the education system is funded and structured where you are. I am in the US and K-12 education is primarily funded by each state- in my case the state of Michigan. 7 cents of every education dollar comes from the US Fed. gov. In MI we have local school districts for each region or town. I live Cedar Springs and we have a Cedar Springs Public School Distric. that I spent 6 years on the board of. I currently teach for a high school about 20 miles away form where I live for the Forest Hills Public School District. My husband teaches HS as well for Intermediate School District which provides speciality education to studetns for the entire county from 87 different shcool districts. These specialties include vocational and special education among other things. The majority of funding for schools in our state comes from a combination of property taxes and a state wide sales tax.
ReplyDeleteHere in Australia funding for Education comes basically from our taxes, and the education is State and Federal bases although each state has a different system. The Federal government provide some financial support although State governments have the final say. Its a bit all over the place.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure which taxes actually contribute to education, but now that you have raised the question you've got my curiosity working.
Our governements have a tendancy to fobb off education by telling handing out grants and education packages to schools who need it and then moving on to spending millions (billions in your case!) on defence, not to mention their election costs etc. I think we would all be better off it they treated the grass roots problems like education and health first. Maybe someone else could answere your question more thoroughly......thanks for commenting!
One of the subjects I teach is policy debate and the national topic argued by students across the entire US this year is regarding decreasing our military presence. My students were surprised to see the actual % the US spends on "defense" - really much of it is offense in my opinion but that is another post all together. Our current rates are between 22 and 23% of the US GDP- no wonder our economy is in trouble.
ReplyDelete