Wednesday, 3 December 2025

 Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (19:00): (1459) I rise this evening on the adjournment debate, and the action I seek from the Minister for Education is for the restoration in full of funding for the P–12 schools in the Polwarth electorate. What I am referring to specifically are the changes flagged in a circular sent to P–12 principals advising them of the following individual funding lines that will be 100 per cent cut over the next four years. We are not talking just a little cut or a tweak, we are talking a 100 per cent cut. Those five areas are the P–12 complexity allowance; the mobility allowance; the split-site/multi-site allowance; language units; and, really importantly for some of the schools in my electorate, the joint community program. P–12s in an electorate like Polwarth are vital. I have P–12s in Lorne, Apollo Bay and Lavers Hill, and I have them in Timboon and Derrinallum – right across my patch. These are schools that provide an essential service to what are relatively isolated communities. They are complex because communities and country towns ebb and flow a lot: one year they have got a lot of students in prep, next year they have got no-one in prep; sometimes they have got four or five kids in year 12, then there are none. What this funding cut does is take away the flexibility that the principals in these schools desperately need to keep providing good quality, ongoing education in regional Victoria.

This state allegedly calls itself the Education State. In fact we are forced to drive around our communities with ‘Education State’ written on our numberplates. Yet when my communities tell me that, for example, in Lorne, just one small community in my electorate, next year they will have 25 ‍extra students and they will have two less teachers because of these cuts – two less teachers, 25 ‍more kids – that is devastating in a small country community. For example, in Lorne the Lorne school has no football oval. It has no outdoor recreation space. It does not have a hall. It does not have any of those facilities. It has and has always had a joint arrangement with the local community and the local shire. They have to pay a contribution to those facilities – great footy oval, great hall, really important for that community, vital in fact, essential – yet the funding is being taken from that, and the only other spot that Lorne school community can get those funds is to take them from their teaching wages. It is wrong, and I call on the minister to immediately reverse those cuts.