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“It’s just really reactive planning, as opposed to proactive planning.”
That’s how a parent at one of Brisbane’s biggest schools describes the government’s approach to our bursting-at-the-seams education system, where large school cohorts are managed by split start times and staggered lunch breaks.
Suburban Futures director Ross Elliott agrees the city’s social infrastructure has not been keeping pace with population growth.
“I think in the last 10 to 20 years, we’ve spent too much time patting ourselves on the back saying how wonderful population growth is for the economy,” Elliott said. “At the same time, [the government] wasn’t looking at the demands on schools, on hospitals – on all infrastructure.”
Pallara State School in Brisbane’s south is the city’s fourth-biggest state primary school and an example of an institution juggling surging demand and limited space.
The split-campus school, which caters to more than 1300 students, was built in 1956 but has had multiple expansions since, most recently a new junior campus for prep and year 1.
The school’s senior campus – for years 2 to 6 – is located 2.5 kilometres down the road.
Before the new campus opened in January, P&C treasurer Chad Redgwell said the school used demountables for years.
He said it was forced to cancel its athletics carnival in 2024 due to limited space caused by demountables on the oval.
When the new junior campus opened, there was no oval, hall, or library for the first term.
“They didn’t want to delay the kids from entering that site because they would have then had to go to the senior school site, spend one term down there, then move the kids down,” Redgwell said.
The large student body was previously managed by splitting start and finish times, as well as lunch breaks.
“So you can imagine you had kids in the classroom trying to learn while the other half of the school’s playing outside,” Redgwell said.
“Because there wasn’t enough play space for the kids at lunchtime, they were running into each other, they were fighting over the space – there were a lot of fights.”
Redgwell said it was his impression that the government was consistently caught off guard by the number of students at the school, and was therefore unprepared for future demand.
He said most in the school community were still anticipating the installation of demountables at the junior school in 2028.
Brisbane’s population boom is taking a toll, Elliott said.
Almost three-quarters of the city’s state primary schools have an enrolment management plan – meaning they are at or over 80 per cent of their capacity.
Enrolments at just under 90 per cent of the state’s high schools are also managed.
Seven schools have opened in Brisbane proper this century. Two are private, and only one was opened in the past decade – two if you count the resurrection of Fortitude Valley State School.
Just over 20 schools have been built in the past decade, WHERE? while the population almost doubled from 737,000 residents to approximately 1.38 million residents.
During the same period, 11 schools closed in Brisbane proper. The only new school on the horizon for the city is a primary school in Brisbane’s inner west, which is under consideration and unconfirmed.WHERE?
Building new schools is especially difficult because of the scarcity of appropriate sites, Elliott said.
Another option is repurposing buildings, such as large stores like Bunnings, or office buildings that are largely unsuitable for housing because of the plumbing.
“It’s always the plumbing,” Elliott said. “In a school, you could have the boys’ and girls’ toilets in the central services core, as they are for an office building.
“Then you can have each different level at school, and then you have the tuck shop and the indoor gym.
“The question then becomes, ‘well, where do they go for exercise?’ And, like a lot of schools around the world, they get in a bus and go to a shared sporting field.
“That’s the model we’re going to have to look at.”
Such schools could also have the benefit of being central, and therefore close to public transport, Elliott said.
Schools are a big part of Brisbane’s infrastructure challenge, he said.
“It’s certainly not easy, and you can understand why not everyone would be happy with the way it’s going,” he said.
“It’s a symptom of the growth, and it’s probably symptomatic of the fact we should have been doing a lot more planning for it many years ago.”
Elliott believes we need to get creative with solutions and look at spaces including office buildings, old shopping buildings, and industrial sheds.
“It requires a different way of thinking about it because in terms of infill, no one’s spoilt for choice,” he said.
“There are no 5-hectare blocks of vacant land. There are no big blocks of land floating around with no one interested in developing them.”
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