Tuesday, 1 April 2025

Newlands Primary School

Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (19:14): (1096) My adjournment matter is for the Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, and the action I seek is for the minister to visit Newlands Primary School to officially open the school’s new gym, administration building and learning spaces. We have been lucky to have the Minister for Education up our way quite often recently, and I do want to just quickly touch first on his recent visit to Reservoir East Primary School. We are lucky enough to have a lot of fantastic schools in Preston and Reservoir, but Reservoir East Primary is a real standout in terms of its innovative educational approaches and its very strong and positive school culture. I think that is very much to the credit of principal James Cumming, assistant principal Linda Lavelle and all of the team they have put together.

One thing that is very striking to me whenever I visit that school, as I did with the minister, is the way that they really go to great lengths to get the best outcomes, both educational outcomes and life outcomes, for their students. They squeeze the most out of any program or opportunity that comes their way. They are quite creative in the way they put different programs together to support their students, and they go out into our community and work with other organisations to support their students. That shines through in all of their work but notably in their work around inclusion and also their work in Koori education, which is very well regarded across the northern suburbs. We had the opportunity to discuss that with James, Linda, Aunty Rikki, Josie, Dani, Nikol, the school council president Susan Arnall and a range of others during our visit. As is often the case, when you talk to people who are getting the most out of programs in order to support their students, you get the best feedback, and we appreciated that.

It would be fantastic to have the minister back to do a very similar thing at Newlands Primary School to get feedback on some of their great programs. Notably they run the only bilingual Spanish primary school program in the state, and they partner with some Indigenous teachers from the bilingual Yirrkala School in north-east Arnhem Land. We would also have the minister along to officially open the new facilities, which are the product of a very significant five-year rebuild that did take place across the challenging COVID period, and I would like to recognise the work on that project of the former member for Pascoe Vale Lizzie Blandthorn, the former member for Preston Robin Scott and long-serving school council president Adam Palmer, who is perhaps one of the few parents left from the original Help Newlands Now campaign.

It has been a transformational project, so it will be great to celebrate its impact on the school and the broader community, and as with any large project, it would be great to get some feedback as well on how it has been working out. I think students and staff have been in those new buildings for a couple of terms now, so we can get some feedback to support not only the ongoing work there but the fantastic ongoing work of this government in our nation-leading school building program. I thank the minister very much for his recent visit to Reservoir East Primary and thank him for his consideration of this adjournment matter.