Where Will They Go To School?

The current debate about relocation of the Margaret Kindergarten has raised a great many questions about the future of inner urban areas and the people who live in them.

Certainly, it makes sense to relocate the kindergarten not only closer to the primary school to which it is attached but also closer to where the parents of the children live. On the other hand, those children and their families also need park space. Whilst each child will spend one year in kindergarten, they will benefit from parkland for many more years.

But the debate has also started to put a spotlight on some of the potential weaknesses of the State Government's push for higher density in inner urban areas.

One of those is that with smaller backyards and more people living in the same area, we will actually need more public open space.

Another is where will the children go to school. For decades, state governments closed inner urban schools. That process has, thankfully, ceased but already the cracks are appearing in the education infrastructure. Look at the primary schools around the Town of Vincent and they are all full and many are over-subscribed.

It is true that family sizes are falling, but there is no guarantee that the number of children in Vincent will not increase. However, it could become a self-fulfilling prophesy - if schools in inner urban areas are inadequate, families with young children will choose not to live in those areas. That would be to the detriment of the diversity that we in Vincent publicly claim to value.

So where is the future planning for the education of our children and grandchildren?

We are told by the Education Department that existing school sites cannot accommodate any more children (hence, the Mt Hawthorn Primary School site cannot accommodate the kindergarten) but equally there are no more school sites planned in the Town. As some people have already said, perhaps we could do with a more innovative approach to school design and architecture to make better use of existing school sites without adversely affecting their amenity and heritage.

The most obvious planned increase in population in Vincent is for the Oxford Centre, Leederville, with the proposed redevelopment of the car parks owned by the Town. This redevelopment will produce some large buildings - perhaps one of these should incorporate a primary school with a play area on the roof. This would provide additional schooling opportunities for the children of parents who work in Leederville (and there will be many more people working in Leederville in the future) and the 'green roof' would provide environmental and energy benefits for occupants of the buildings.

Come to that, we could require green roofs for buildings in the redevelopment - that would also help provide the green open space for residents, workers and visitors.