Tuesday, 17 March 2020

St Francis Xavier Primary School, Ballarat East

Ms SETTLE (Buninyong) (13:55): Last week I had the absolute pleasure of welcoming year 6 students from St Francis Xavier Primary School to a tour of Parliament House. They were an extraordinarily curious bunch of students, and there were lots and lots of questions.

St Francis Xavier Primary School is a co-educational school under a joint sponsorship with the Institute of Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea, and the Ballarat Catholic Education Office. In 1902 the Sisters of Mercy in Ballarat East purchased Fortune’s Folly and the grounds at Mount Xavier. This beautiful home and its surroundings were established as the Villa Maria Convent and evolved into a small farm to supply primary produce for the community of sisters and the boarders at nearby Sacred Heart College. In 1914 the sisters registered and opened St Francis Xavier Primary School as a boys boarding school at the convent. The school grew to include day students in 1960 and it became co-educational in 1974. The school is growing today, with a target of 500 students by 2022. Last year I had the pleasure to announce that the Andrews Labor government would deliver a $2 million fund injection to build six new classrooms at St Francis Xavier Primary School. As the school gets closer to reaching its capacity, the funding has been committed under a $402 million four-year state government commitment to non-government schools.

It really was a pleasure to have the children here. We sat in the house, and it was wonderful to explain to them about representative democracy.