Ten schools share new building funding, announced three weeks before Parliament rises for the election
Botany Downs Secondary College will get eight new classrooms and the new Chapel Downs Junior College a gymnasium, under a $32.8 million school property package announced on Tuesday by Education Minister Erica Stanford.
The announcement sees funding allocated for 34 classrooms and one gym across 10 schools nationally, all of them picked for what the Government calls significant roll growth pressure.
Botany Downs Secondary College’s eight new classrooms is the largest building allocation on the list.
“We are focused on getting better value from the school property portfolio so we can invest more where the pressure is greatest,” Stanford said.
The gym goes to Chapel Downs Junior College, a Year 7 to 10 state school being built on the Chapel Downs School site at 170 Dawson Road, Flat Bush, which is due to take its first students in Term 1 next year.
Stanford said the gym would arrive earlier than planned, with construction expected to start about April 2027 and finish in the middle of 2028.
She said the package was paid for out of savings rather than new money.
“Every dollar we save through more efficient delivery is put into the classrooms and facilities schools need,” she said.
“We are delivering more bang for buck by improving the way school property is planned and built. This means our funding is going further, and even more classrooms can be delivered.”
The Government says more efficient planning and delivery has produced more than $330 million in savings across the school property portfolio since July 2024.
Last October it put the change in plain terms: the cost of delivering a classroom had been halved, from $1.2 million to $620,000, by using repeatable designs and building the rooms offsite.
The projects announced on Tuesday are to start over the next 12 months and will use the same standard designs and offsite manufacturing.
The Ministry of Education says the new junior college is to cope with significant growth in the region.
The Ministry’s consultation, which ran from March to April this year, said about 2,500 new homes in the area are expected to generate around 800 extra Year 7 to 10 students by 2029.
The neighbouring Ormiston and Mission Heights schools have taken in more than 1,000 additional junior secondary students since 2018 and have been leaning on temporary classrooms to do it.
Chapel Downs Junior College is taking enrolments now for Year 7 and 8 places in 2027.
The announcement lands three and a half weeks before Parliament is dissolved on 1 October, and two months before the general election on 7 November.
