As planners, designers and developers, are we asking ourselves often enough – Are we being schooled? Specifically, what do we think about the role of the Department of Education in planning our cities, towns and suburbs?
In this TBB Insights article, Paul Needham (Principal) and Eric Denholm (Associate Director) consider whether current school site planning standards still make sense for growing communities.
For those that don’t know, the Department basically has a veto over planning decisions it doesn’t agree with. And it has some very particular and often inflexible requirements – many of which haven’t changed much for decades.
Teach me something
Primary school sites must be a minimum of four hectares (and make sure there’s no bushland). High schools need ten hectares. In a typical new subdivision in Perth, you can fit at least 150 homes on ten hectares. 200 homes wouldn’t be unusual.
We don’t need to look very hard to find very successful schools, with the same or more students, on much smaller sites. Public primary school sites in our older suburbs are much smaller than four hectares – 1.5 hectares is typical. Private schools are rarely even half as big as their public equivalents. There is a very well-established private high school operating in Perth’s city centre on a 2.5 hectare site.
School sites also need to be ‘squarish-rectangles’ (technical term) with a minimum of three road frontages and be in the middle of new suburbs. Developers also give the land to the Department for free, passing at least some of the cost of doing so on to the new homebuyer (it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the essence).
So, what’s wrong with that?
Whilst early in the life of a new suburb there may be lots of kids, 20-30 years later the kids have grown up, and the number of kids never gets back to what it was. But the shape of that suburb - the road network, the housing lots and many other things will remain the same for many decades or even centuries to come. In the process we are left not just with more and bigger school sites than we really need.
Those big rectangles in the middle of our new suburbs are not major hubs of activity for the surrounding neighbourhood. Children and staff arrive in the morning and leave in the afternoon – maybe with some afternoon sport practice. As a parent, occasionally but hopefully not too often, you turn up for an assembly or to collect a child from sick bay.
School buildings are also put a long way from the boundaries and surrounded on several sides by car parking. Which sounds a bit like a 1980’s shopping centre. That no one walks to. Surely this can’t be helpful if we want children to walk or ride to school? In fact, it’s rather unhelpful when it comes to making places walkable full stop.
We haven’t even mentioned declining birth rates and the ageing population, or that more parents are sending their children to private schools than was the case a few decades ago.
And a school might not get built for a long time – or at all
Having plonked a great big treeless rectangle in the middle of a neighbourhood, forcing everyone to plan around it, and not actually paying for the privilege, the site can sit there vacant for…decades. There’s one primary school site we know of that first appeared on plans before the youngest of our urban design team had left primary school, was transferred to the Department before he’d left high school, and twenty years on shows no sign of ever being developed (but would be a great place to build much needed homes).
What do you think?
Don’t get us wrong, education, including and especially public education, is important. As are the health and safety of our kids.
But what do you think? Should the Department have so much influence over the planning of our cities, towns and suburbs? Could and should we think a little differently about planning and delivering schools in both our growing new communities and our (evolving) existing neighbourhoods?
In coming weeks, there will be a follow-up piece setting out some ideas, tailored to the WA context, about how we might do things a little differently – so watch this space!
In the meantime, take a look at the two school sites below. Both are public primary schools. Both serve local communities. But one sits within an established, walkable neighbourhood on a much smaller site. The other reflects the larger, more standardised school sites we often see in new growth areas.
So, which one feels more connected to its neighbourhood?
Victoria Park Primary School accommodates around 75% of Alkimos Primary School’s student numbers on just 28% of the land.
5 min read
