A Mill Park school that offers an alternative form of education for students who are disengaged from traditional schooling is desperately seeking a bigger site.
The Pavilion School, which operates at a Whittlesea council-owned space in Plenty Valley shopping centre, has about 20 teenagers on its waiting list.
But the school has just one makeshift classroom and some shared office space that the council allows it to use for a peppercorn fee.
Principal Josie Howie said the school could not accommodate the students’ needs.
“Most years we have about 30 kids on our waiting list. Mainstream schools just aren’t working for them.”
The school opened in 2010 with 30 students. It now has 80, who study an alternative form of education tailored to individual needs.
Ms Howie said they planned to move to a disused school site, but little progress had been made in five years.
A bid for Department of Education land in Kingsway Drive fell through in 2012 and was used instead to house the new Lalor Gardens Primary School, derived from a merger between Lalor West and Lalor Park primary schools.
Ms Howie said there were not many suitable school sites with adequate access to public transport left in the area.
“We could move into a community space, but we can’t afford too many overheads or big rents,” she said.
“That’s what’s so great about partnering with Whittlesea council but it’s just not adequate for educational purposes.”
She said high levels of youth unemployment added to the school’s problems.
“If all of these kids were getting jobs we wouldn’t have this demand,” she said.
The northern suburbs have some of the state’s highest youth unemployment levels, and Victorian Council of Social Service chief executive officer Emma King says this emphasises the area’s concentrated disadvantage.
“There aren’t enough jobs, or the right jobs, near where people live,” she said. “Or there’s really significant competition for them because unemployment is so high.”
