Have you heard the amazing news?!^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7 ... you get the picture – this is big.}

The government have announced:

• 4 new inner-city state schools (Primary Schools for Docklands, North Melbourne and Fishermen's Bend plus a Secondary School for Fishermens Bend).
• Docklands children will no longer be disadvantaged by being forced to frog-leap Uni High to attend secondary school at Mount Alexander College in Flemington and will be zoned to their closest secondary school (Uni High or Albert Park College).

This is incredible news for children and families living in the inner-city – and it happened thanks to the petition signed by CitySchools4CityKids members like you.

It's a massive win. But University High is already full, neighbouring primary schools are bursting at the seams and the new school gates are not open yet. Not a single cent has been committed by the Government towards any of the recent announcements on Inner-City schools, nor was there a commitment to provide resources to University High School to expand its capacity.

Greater Melbourne’s population boom is concentrated in the inner city. According to the Grattan Institute, the City of Melbourne is facing the most severe school shortage among inner-city municipalities, and is set to experience a 62.9% increase in school-aged children in the next decade—or almost 7500 extra students.⁹

The critical delay in failing to provide schools to service the rapidly growing population of the inner city was caused by fundamental flaws in the methodology used in the Docklands School Provision Reports (2011 and 2016) which resulted in forecast capacity and demand for State schools in the inner city being dramatically understated.

It's appalling that more accurate datasets including actual enrolment figures from the DET, planning approvals and high resolution population data from the City of Melbourne were not used and considered "outside the scope" of the Docklands school provision studies. Extrapolated forecasts from obsolete census data are inherently inaccurate in high density growth areas. Yet, even with these understated forecasts, the 2016 Docklands School Provision Report determined there will be thousands of inner-city children in the next decade without a school place at an inclusive government school.

All families in a community should be given the choice to attend their closest inclusive State school, and not forced out of their community due to lack of government school provision.

We must keep up the fight. We need the Premiers urgent action to meet critical capacity shortages in secondary schools to service the inner city. We have launched a new petitionto urge the government to fund these promises in the 2017 State Budget and for Docklands School to be P-12, so we would encourage you all to sign and spread the word(https://www.change.org/p/premier-daniel-andrews-new-primary-and-secondary-schools-for-melbourne-s-inner-city-commissioned-by-2019).

Please take a moment to celebrate the progress we've made together, and then get ready for round two, because we need to double down on this success.

Thank you for all you have done and will do in the campaign to build #CitySchools4CityKids.

Together, united, we will continue to make a positive difference.

Kind Regards,

Denise Fung-Henderson, Michelle Styles and Jo Fallshaw for the CitySchools4CityKids team

E: info@cityschools4citykids.com

FB: www.facebook.com/cityschools4citykids