Six new schools for start of 1995 State school year

29/1/95

Six new schools - including three new education support centres for children with disabilities - will open their doors for classes on Tuesday (January 31) for the start of the 1995 State school year.

One of the new state-of-the-art high schools - Ballajura Community Campus - will commence the middle school concept, where Year 7 children attend high school.  This structure was designed to ease the transition for students from primary to high school.

Education Minister Norman Moore said today a total of 250,150 students, in pre-primary, primary and secondary schools, would return to Government school classes this week.  Some 21,000 children would be starting school for the first time.

"This will be an historic year for education in Western Australia, with the State Government to re-write the Education Act, make important decisions about further devolution, and further upgrade rural education," Mr Moore said.

"When the $10 million upgrading of distance education starts to take effect, more school communities will vote on changes to improve the quality of education for children, and the new Aboriginal Education and Training Council will be established."

Mr Moore said that four new primary schools - Halls Head, Riverside (Mandurah), Kinross and Merriwa (Perth's northern suburbs), and two new secondary schools - Ballajura and Warnbro - would conduct classes for the first time.

Three new education support centres for students with disabilities would start classes at Mandurah Senior High School, Merriwa and Riverside.

Implementation of the Shean Report into the education of children with special needs would mean an extra $1 million spent in the next six months on students with learning difficulties, with a further $1 million available after June.

Construction would start this year on four new primary schools, worth a total of $15 million, to open their doors in 1996.  The new schools would be built at Glen Iris (Bunbury), Singleton and Port Kennedy (Rockingham) and O'Connor (Kalgoorlie-Boulder).

Work had begun on the new Warnbro Senior High School and its students were starting the new school year-off campus, based at Rockingham Senior High School.

Changes to the voluntary full-time pre-primary program for five-year-olds, meant that an extra 57 extra schools would provide places this year.  This meant an extra 1,200 children would be accommodated, bringing the total number of places to 8,500.

Media contact: Ross Storey 339 3972 / 321 1444