Dr LIM - 2005-05-04
In answer to a question yesterday about the loss of 1288 primary school students over the last four years in the Territory, you resorted to your old excuse of blaming the ABS. Will you now acknowledge that these figures have nothing to do with the ABS? They were actually derived from your own budget papers, and that these losses have actually occurred and you have done nothing about it.
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Greatorex for his question. I am not sure where he gets that figure from, but page 90 of Budget Paper No 3 says, in total, primary school student enrolments at 19 851 - that is the 2004-05 estimate; 19 600 in 2005-06. If he is reading that, it is a difference of 251. There is a slight addition if you go across to total secondary student enrolments of 9639 to 9650. It does not make up for that nett fall as, obviously, school kids continue to grow and age, as the rest of the population does. That means some of them slip through into high school, and we will see continued growth in our high schools over time.
With that 1.2% population growth throughout 2004-05 and a conservative estimate of another 1% in 2005-06, we will see added population into our schools. I see it in my own electorate all the time. For many years, we were the largest primary school in the Northern Territory at Nhulunbuy, with over 700 kids. Then the Christian school came along, and it has probably 100 or a little more now, so the numbers in the primary school have come down. Now, you would think with 600 or 700 at the primary school, what size is the high school? The high school, at its height, has made about 250 or 260. That is a big difference. Where do these kids go? Some go interstate. Sometimes families move interstate. Some kids go to boarding schools and do not appear in these figures. You will never have the translation of the entire primary school cohort into the secondary schooling system.
That is one of the reasons, if you go back to late 2002 that the Chief Minister said: ‘We are going to have a look at our secondary schools and review the whole secondary system’. We will continue to work on that and strengthen those numbers, the retention, catchment and shift from primary into secondary schools. There are fewer in primary, more in secondary, and I would expect that primary figure to grow as we continue to grow the population.
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Greatorex for his question. I am not sure where he gets that figure from, but page 90 of Budget Paper No 3 says, in total, primary school student enrolments at 19 851 - that is the 2004-05 estimate; 19 600 in 2005-06. If he is reading that, it is a difference of 251. There is a slight addition if you go across to total secondary student enrolments of 9639 to 9650. It does not make up for that nett fall as, obviously, school kids continue to grow and age, as the rest of the population does. That means some of them slip through into high school, and we will see continued growth in our high schools over time.
With that 1.2% population growth throughout 2004-05 and a conservative estimate of another 1% in 2005-06, we will see added population into our schools. I see it in my own electorate all the time. For many years, we were the largest primary school in the Northern Territory at Nhulunbuy, with over 700 kids. Then the Christian school came along, and it has probably 100 or a little more now, so the numbers in the primary school have come down. Now, you would think with 600 or 700 at the primary school, what size is the high school? The high school, at its height, has made about 250 or 260. That is a big difference. Where do these kids go? Some go interstate. Sometimes families move interstate. Some kids go to boarding schools and do not appear in these figures. You will never have the translation of the entire primary school cohort into the secondary schooling system.
That is one of the reasons, if you go back to late 2002 that the Chief Minister said: ‘We are going to have a look at our secondary schools and review the whole secondary system’. We will continue to work on that and strengthen those numbers, the retention, catchment and shift from primary into secondary schools. There are fewer in primary, more in secondary, and I would expect that primary figure to grow as we continue to grow the population.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016