Wednesday, 21 September 2022

Mooroopna secondary education

Petition

Ms LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:32): I rise to speak on the petition I tabled yesterday that calls on the government to ensure a high-quality and high-equity local high school in Mooroopna is opened as soon as possible. This is a petition that has come from a passionate group of parents, a group of parents who have formed a group called COOL, College of Mooroopna Learning. These are people who are disgruntled with the Andrews government’s removal of choice in education in Greater Shepparton. They are not the only group that has started up. A long time ago a group called Greater Shepparton Voice 4 Choice Public Education also started up because they were so dissatisfied with the Andrews government’s policy that established a single secondary college and closed our four former colleges. This has caused a lot of angst in Shepparton. Parents and students want choice. This school that they established, the Greater Shepparton Secondary College, suits some students but not all students. We are a community of over 65 000 people. We need more than one secondary school in that community, and when that school is established it will be governed by the community under a Liberal government.

The year before the current school started out there were 2645 students in the four secondary schools in Greater Shepparton. According to the Shepparton Education Plan document—the government’s own document—that figure was due to increase to 3117 students by 2026. Currently today that figure is at 2088 students, so we have around 600 students that are just missing. We do not know where they have gone. In June of this year I actually did ask the government, when it was at 500 students missing, to investigate that and to report back on the reasons that these students had moved on. Had they gone to other schools? Well, we know the numbers have not gone up that greatly that they had gone to other schools. Are they being homeschooled, or are they just lost to the education system altogether? The government’s answer was no, they would not do that. They are just determined to push ahead with the single-school model.

The Liberal Party, in stark contrast to Labor, has consulted with the Greater Shepparton community. We know the Greater Shepparton community wants choice in public education. We have made an election commitment that if we are elected in November we will establish a second secondary college in Greater Shepparton, but unlike the current government, who when they did their so-called consultation gave the community a couple of choices that really were not choices—it was, ‘Keep your four schools and we’ll do nothing or have two schools and we’ll do a little bit or have a brand new school’—we will actually consult with the community on what they want that second school to look like and where they want that second school to be located. I congratulate Lea Campbell, who started this petition and who started the COOL group. I also congratulate Robyn Morrison, who heads up Greater Shepparton Voice 4 Choice Public Education for being leaders in our community, leaders amongst parents, who are advocating for this second school.

As I said, we will conduct genuine consultation with the Greater Shepparton community on what they want that school to look like and where they want that school to be located. Of course this particular survey does come out of Mooroopna, with Lea and her group, the COOL group—College of Mooroopna Learning. Mooroopna is a city of around 8500 residents. There is no wonder a group has stood up there saying, ‘We want a secondary college’, because they do not have a secondary college in that community. All the children from Mooroopna and from Tatura, which is a community of around 4700 residents that is further to the west than Mooroopna, have to travel into Shepparton every day to go to this single school, which does not suit every student.

Kialla is an area that has around 8600 residents as well, and there is a strong group in the south of Shepparton that have started up, as there is a strong group in Tatura that are also advocating for that second school to be located there. So we have Mooroopna, we have Tatura and we have the south of Shepparton. There have also been approaches from the north of Shepparton. We have groups who had already started up before the Liberal Party even made their policy announcement to say they wanted that second secondary college in their community. We will conduct genuine consultation and we will establish a second secondary college for families in Greater Shepparton.