Thursday, 20 March 2025

Education funding

Tim READ (Brunswick) (00:34): (1087) Happy Friday, everyone. My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Education, and the action I seek is that the government provide more maintenance funding for old public school buildings. Melbourne’s inner city is fortunate to have a number of public schools located in beautiful old buildings. There are several in my electorate with histories stretching back more than 100 years. My own children went to one of these schools, so I can personally attest that as much as our family and our community value and appreciate these buildings we know they need extra attention and maintenance to keep them in good shape. I have visited local public schools many times since I was elected, and while every building is different, you start to hear about many of the same problems: leaking roofs, rotting window frames, peeling paint and cracks in the walls. Much of this needs expensive scaffolding to reach. Sometimes entire rooms are closed off to students and staff out of concern for their safety, and this is usually the point at which the state government steps in to fix the problem. But the government needs to properly fund preventative maintenance before more expensive building work is required. We want these buildings to be maintained so that our students have a safe and welcoming learning environment and our teachers feel valued.

I have appealed to the state Labor government many times on behalf of these schools, with mixed success, asking the Treasurer for more money in the annual budget, asking questions in Parliament and writing to the education minister about individual schools, but many of these problems persist, and they get more expensive and difficult to fix as time passes. In the meantime, I have heard of at least one case in which parents were pooling their own money to fund necessary repairs. That should never happen a public school, where the state has an obligation to ensure a safe and healthy learning environment. I quote from the Department of Education’s webpage on heritage buildings:

Under the Heritage Act 2017 … principals, as asset managers, must not allow Victorian Heritage Register listed buildings to fall into disrepair or fail to maintain those buildings to the extent that their conservation is threatened.

At first glance this seems fair enough, but I do not know how many public school principals can keep up their end of this bargain if the state government does not give them enough money. Maintenance funding is often only enough to paint a couple of classrooms each year. The state cannot argue that we have not had the money when we look at spending on the grand prix, horse race funding, massive road projects and the massive new prison that has been sitting empty for two years. Surely here in the Education State our students are more important.