Tuesday, 30 May 2023

Reservoir High School

Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (19:04): (202) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Education, and the action I seek is for the minister to visit Reservoir High School to attend the opening of the soon-to-be-completed manual arts building. The refurbished and upgraded building will provide students with new state-of-the-art food technology kitchens and three purpose-built studios for textiles, media and product design.

We know it is very important for students as they enter those secondary years to have those options of different subjects they might want to pursue, and this particular refurbishment will deliver exactly that. It is part of Labor’s $14.9 billion investment in school buildings right across the state, which does include over $170 million that this government has invested in the Preston and Reservoir area. Of course it will also support the government’s VCE vocation major reforms, which enhance the pathways for students into a range of important and in-demand vocations.

I do not want to put too much pressure on the students, but I do understand they have been recently learning to make some slices and tasty treats, and I am hoping, if we get the timing right, we might be able to sample some of their work and see the new kitchens in action. While she is there, the minister will no doubt also take the chance to check out the rest of the campus. It is a very beautifully situated campus. It sort of cascades down along Plenty Road to the Darebin Creek – a very leafy, very green, very nice part of the world. The minister will enjoy walking round chatting to the staff and students and hearing about all the great work that they do there, and I am sure she will particularly appreciate that there is a series of flags in the foyer of Reservoir High, 65 different flags, representing the diversity of countries of birth of their very diverse student body.

In testament to the hard work of the school staff and indeed its students, the Age newspaper recognised Reservoir High in 2021 as the winner of the Schools that Excel award amongst government schools in the north. I do not think we necessarily want to turn education into a competition, but I do think that that award was recognition of a very good decade of delivering educational outcomes by that school. And when the minister visits – if she visits – she will have the chance to meet the new principal Katie Watmough, who will no doubt continue to take the school from strength to strength ably assisted by her great team, including assistant principal Lea Volpe, who did a wonderful job of standing in as acting principal earlier this year. The school has a really strong, positive and concrete vision for its future. I am sure the leadership of the school would love the chance to explain it in further detail to the minister if and when she can get down, and we thank her for her consideration.