Thursday, 19 March 2026

 Gabrielle DE VIETRI (Richmond) (17:15): (1605) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Education, and the action that I seek is for the minister to visit Collingwood College and make their classrooms safe and functional. On Monday I visited Collingwood College, and what I saw was absolutely shocking. Concrete from the roof is falling through the ceiling into the classrooms below, chunks large enough to seriously injure or even kill a student. There are large pools of water across the entire floor and literal stalactites where the ceiling has been leaking for years. This is not an isolated incident; this is the result of long-term water damage, a failure to maintain and a failure to act from the Labor state government, a government that has known about this problem for years.

The Victorian School Building Authority’s emergency response program Make-safe came along and rightly closed off the entire top floor of the building. These classrooms and all the school’s science labs are now out of bounds. Students are crammed into the remaining spaces, and staff and families are rightly anxious about whether other parts of the building are even safe. We are at a point of neglect now where the concrete is collapsing, steel reinforcements are corroding and water is leaking through the ceiling into floors below, down stairwells and into hallways. This issue remains seriously unresolved, and the government is missing in action. There have been no further responses from the government or the VSBA since the floor was blocked off, and the school has had to contract an engineer themselves just to assess the damage in a report that the Labor state government has ignored. Minister, this is a matter of urgent safety and of equity. This school community deserves to have safe learning spaces like everyone else, without the risk of concrete collapsing into the school. I ask that the minister urgently visit Collingwood College to see the damage, direct the VSBA to assess the site and fund the necessary repairs to make this school safe without delay.