Students facing squeeze on classroom space

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This was published 10 years ago

Students facing squeeze on classroom space

By Anna Patty

Plans to reduce school space for public school students have been revealed in two reports commissioned by the state government and Infrastructure NSW.

The reduced square-metre-per-student targets have emerged as the infrastructure group urges the state government to squeeze more children into existing classrooms.

The NSW Department of Education is cited as the source of the floor-space ratios in a report commissioned by Infrastructure NSW, which is headed by former premier Nick Greiner.

Finance Minister Greg Pearce commissioned a second report which also refers to reducing the floor-space-per-student ratio to achieve targets. Mr Pearce commissioned the Property Asset Utilisation Taskforce Report, completed in September last year, using information from the department.

Infrastructure NSW commissioned PriceWaterhouseCoopers to complete its report last year.

This says the target for primary schools last year was 8.22 sqm per student, which is less than the the 2011 figure of 8.24 sqm per student. For high schools, last year's target ratio was 8.22, compared with 9.12 for 2011.

''Reconfiguration and rationalisation of under-utilised assets across the high school and TAFE portfolios can provide opportunities for recycling capital to improve facilities and provide larger schools,'' it says.

The NSW Infrastructure Report names the Department of Education as the source of the targets.

NSW Greens MP John Kaye says the reports indicate the government is forcing public schools to shoehorn students into higher-density teaching spaces to free up land for sale.

''The O'Farrell government is sacrificing the quality of schooling and the future of public education by cutting the space available to each student,'' he said. ''Despite their denials, this is an appallingly short-sighted grab for cash.''

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The department says it will have to build new schools to accommodate the demand for public school places on Sydney's north shore.

But a spokesman for the department said it was ''neither acting nor planning to reduce classroom size or floor-space per student.

An appallingly short-sighted grab for cash.

''The total asset management measure of permanent usable floor-space per student is used to measure how well the department uses the space in its assets across the state.''

Minister for Education Adrian Piccoli referred questions on reductions in classroom space to the department. He said he disagrees with the Infrastructure NSW recommendation to squeeze a growing number of students into the existing classroom space.

''I do not believe 90 per cent of the additional students can be accommodated in existing schools,'' he said. ''We do not necessarily have schools with space in areas where we have demand. That is a management issue for the department. I don't know if the Infrastructure NSW board took that into consideration.''

Mr Piccoli has said the government did not plan to increase class sizes. He said the existing class size policy would remain in place until at least 2016.

The British government released plans last year to reduce the size of new school classrooms as a cost-saving measure.

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