Thursday, 3 April 2025

 Rachel WESTAWAY (Prahran) (17:31): (1119) My adjournment this evening is for the Minister for Education, and the action I am seeking is for the minister to commit to funding a new school hall for St Kilda Primary School. St Kilda Primary School is a wonderful local school in my electorate with an enrolment of around 500 children. It is situated near the corner of Chapel Street and St Kilda Road. Its old school hall was demolished in 2020 to make way for a new building. The initial plans included a new school hall. However, at the very last moment the hall was removed from the final plans without any consultation with the school community. It simply was not built.

Since that time the school has been forced to hold their assemblies outdoors. On hot days the schoolchildren sit on the hot concrete to receive their pen licences or awards. Worse still, their assemblies are cancelled if it is raining. On rainy days there is nowhere to go at lunchtime, and there is no gym space available for PE lessons, drama classes and other school activities that require a large indoor area. The lack of a school hall creates difficulties for students and teachers. Children’s learning, sport and drama activities should not be weather dependent. Importantly, after school hours a hall would offer a valuable community resource to be used for sporting and recreational activities.

Once a new school hall is built it will also be possible to finally demolish an old asbestos-riddled building on the school site. This building is currently being used for an after-hours program for students, but our local community deserves better than having to make do with this makeshift facility in an outdated and potentially hazardous building. This desperately needed community and school assembly hall is critically important to the St Kilda community because the majority of students at the school live in flats and apartments with very limited access to open space. The Balaclava–St Kilda East area, a large part of the school’s catchment area, has one of the lowest percentages of open space in the region – 5 per cent of open land area compared to 17 per cent across the City of Port Phillip. These children need space to play and learn and to not be restricted to weather-dependent facilities.

On Monday I was pleased to be part of a very large and noisy crowd at a rally held at the school to show strong support for the local community and for the new school hall. The rally was expertly MCed by Dave Hughes, a former parent at the school, but the real stars of the show were the students with their loud and enthusiastic chanting. The hundreds of students, parents and local community members who attended the rally emphasised the need to build this hall as an urgent priority. Such was the newsworthiness of this hall that it was covered by mainstream media.

Minister, the students, staff, parents and the entire school community at St Kilda Primary School need and deserve an appropriate learning environment, including a fit-for-purpose school hall. I urge you not to ignore their fair and reasonable request and call on you to commit the funds needed to build this school hall in the forthcoming state budget and to then get on with building the new hall.