Just came across this article Assumption that ‘people in units don’t have children’ has led to chronic schools shortage in NSW on news.com.au. There are some known and well interesting tidbits coming out of it.
The government has previously said that by 2031 an additional 164,000 public school places will need to be created in order to meet growing demand. This extra money, which will be handed down during Tuesday night’s state budget, will only fund an extra 32,000 places.
Mr Stokes said NSW’s severe lack of schools was due to the growth of “inner and middle ring” suburban locations, which is a “sleeper issue which was not properly planned for historically.”
“What I meant by that, is there was an assumption by demographers historically that people who live in units don’t have children, and as a result there was an insufficient planning,” Mr Stokes said.
“So a lot of that investment is going to be required in inner, middle ring suburbs of Sydney that 10 or 20 years were thought to be very well served, like Penthurst, places around Ryde … areas that we have to retrofit new schools and we have to be innovative about that because we don’t have the land resources in those locations that we have in other areas,” he said.
I have done some previous discussion on this issue. Guess what why the inner cities got no space for new schools, it is because of the successive State government’s failure to plan for the future and sold off a large number of inner city school sites. Those sites will not be able to satisfy the projected demand but will go hell lot long way towards that goal. In the recent years’ Australian politics at both State and Federal level progressively become more and more short term thinking, anything not happening outside next few years just gets ignored and simply pass the buck to the future governments.
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