pasCOEDucation

02/06/2026

😔 One of the most disappointing parts of being involved with pascoeducation is hearing directly from students, families and school communities about the reality of public secondary education in North Merri-bek.

❌ Years of underfunding and under-utilisation.

❌ “Education plans” that vaguely promise transformation but never deliver the meaningful change local communities were led to expect.

❤️ At the same time, it has been an absolute privilege to help tell the story of a community that has never stopped fighting for better.

📣 Local families and students have spent years advocating for the investment, opportunities and long-term vision our public secondary schools should have received without the need for endless campaigns, consultations and carefully staged announcements.

🛑 What continues to stand out is this:

📢 Real advocacy has always come from the ground up… from parents, students, educators and community members who keep pushing long after the media releases and photo opportunities.

🙌 We will always encourage local families and young people to use their voices to shape the future of their community.

🔥 Because if North Merri-bek has taught us anything, it’s that genuine change is rarely handed down — it is demanded, fought for and driven by the people living the reality every day.

Victorian Labor Victorian Greens Liberal Victoria Angelica Panopoulos Oscar Yildiz JP Evan Mulholland MP Ben Carroll MP Anthony Cianflone MP Kathleen Matthews-Ward MP
Samantha Ratnam Victorian Socialists Alex Crowe

24/05/2026

📌For years we have been told Victoria is “the Education State.” Yet behind the slogan sits an uncomfortable reality: Victoria remains one of the lowest-funded public-school systems in the country against the Schooling Resource Standard, while enrolment pressures, student complexity and community expectations continue to grow.

💔Nowhere exposes that contradiction more clearly than North Merri-bek.

🌏This region should have been the perfect proving ground for a new generation of public secondary education, a genuine public-school revolution built around what local families actually need. Instead, the North Merri-bek Education Plan risks becoming another example of politics mistaking branding for reform.

🗣️Because communities were never asking for glossy plans, media releases or carefully staged announcements. They were asking for high-quality local secondary schools that families would confidently choose.

📌That required governments to ask difficult but necessary questions:

🔻Why are families still travelling outside the area for better public secondary options?
🔻What specialised academic, vocational, arts and wellbeing programs are missing locally?
🔻Which schools require genuine structural redesign, not just cosmetic upgrades?
🔻How do we create schools that reflect the expectations of modern families and students?

Instead, the approach has too often been fragmented: small announcements, incremental upgrades and political messaging designed to create the appearance of progress without delivering the scale of change required.

😡Communities notice the difference.

Parents understand that a new building alone does not create a thriving school. Infrastructure matters, but so do pathways, leadership, student support, academic offerings, extracurricular opportunities and long-term investment.

⚡️That is the squandered opportunity of North Merri-bek.⚡️

📚This area could have become a model for modern public education reform: culturally diverse communities, growing population density, highly engaged families and enormous demand for strong local public schools.

📌The ingredients for success already exist.
📌What has been missing is political courage.

Imagine if government had treated North Merri-bek as a genuine education reform project: fully funded neighbourhood secondary schools, specialised pathways across campuses, more enhanced partnerships with universities and TAFEs, embedded and expanded wellbeing support, and strategic planning across the entire network instead of schools competing for survival.

High-performing education systems around the world show the same thing: strong public schools are not built through slogans. They are built through sustained investment, long-term planning and genuine engagement with the communities they serve.

🔄Instead, communities in Melbourne’s north have endured the same cycle for years: announcement, photo opportunity, delay, review, reannouncement.

How many times should community groups have to sit across the table from politicians explaining the same problems before meaningful action occurs?

🏰Eventually another building will be announced. Another funding package will arrive. Another press conference will be held.

🤷‍♀️But many families already understand the deeper issue: the fundamental transformation was never pursued.

❌North Merri-bek did not need a symbolic education plan. It needed a bold rethink of what public secondary education could become.

📌Because this conversation is bigger than one region. If governments cannot deliver meaningful public-school reform in a community this engaged, this vocal and this full of potential, what does that say about the broader future of public education in Victoria?

The next phase cannot simply be about repairing buildings.
🤞It must be about rebuilding confidence in public education itself, through real investment, structural reform and schools designed around the needs, ambitions and futures of the communities they serve.

Ben Carroll MP Anthony Cianflone MPKathleen Matthews-Ward MP Anasina Gray-Barberio Angelica Panopoulos Samantha Ratnam Jess Wilson MP Victorian Socialists Liberal Victoria Alex Crowe Peter Khalil

19/05/2026

🗣️Families across Melbourne’s north are tired of slogans, staged announcements and governments treating public education like a media strategy.

💡Communities are asking for something simple: properly funded local public schools, modern facilities and real investment in every child’s future — not just the schools that make good headlines.

🛑You cannot call education the “great equaliser” while delaying billions in funding and leaving vulnerable schools to fight for the basics. Public schools should not need numerous grassroots campaigns just to be noticed.

💪A strong education system is built through long-term investment, accountability, leadership and the courage to ask hard questions and pursue innovative solutions that break entrenched cycles of disadvantage — not media spin.

🕵️The real question is: why are communities forced to fight so hard for what every child should already be guaranteed?

18/05/2026

The Saturday Paper

Victorian teachers turn spotlight on plight of public schools

“An AEU survey ... found among more than 10,000 public school teachers ... 86 per cent spent their own money on classroom supplies, with an average annual outlay of $988 per teacher.”

"Nationally, this amounts to $177 million annually – money saved by state and territory governments."

https://archive.is/IXE1E


Anthony Cianflone MP
Ben Carroll MP

06/05/2026

📣Announcements like this don’t land in North Merri-bek the way you think they do Ben Carroll MP they land with scepticism, because people here have heard it all before.

⏰For years, this community has been asking, clearly, consistently, and with evidence, for meaningful transformation of our local secondary schools. Not cosmetic changes. Not political announcements. Real investment and structural reform that reflects what families actually need. Instead, what we’ve seen is a pattern: decisions shaped by political convenience, not community voice. And year after year, local families are left dealing with the consequences.

🗳️So when new promises suddenly appear in the lead-up to an election, it doesn’t feel like progress, it feels like déjà vu. Hope is offered, but delivery never quite follows.

📝At the last election, North Merri-bek trusted that the education plan on the table would respond to the data and reflect what residents had been saying for years. That trust mattered. And it was tested. But the outcome hasn't matched the need, and the community knows it.

🤫What followed was telling: initial silence, then a scramble to promote a plan that failed to address the concerns consistently raised by the community and local teachers. Winning an election might win you power, but it doesn’t fix a problem. Delivering real change for the community does and there has been little to suggest that genuine listening or meaningful change is actually underway.

😡This is where the frustration sits. Not in a lack of ideas, or engagement, or willingness from the community—but in being consistently overlooked.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒North Merri-bek families aren’t asking for anything extraordinary. They’re asking for what should already exist: strong, well-resourced local public secondary schools that give their children real opportunity, close to home. Schools that reflect the potential of the community they serve.

😪Right now, that opportunity is being missed. And it’s not because people haven’t spoken up, it’s because those in a position to act have chosen not to listen.

💔That’s the gap. And until that changes, announcements alone won’t rebuild trust.

Anthony Cianflone MP Kathleen Matthews-Ward MP Angelica Panopoulos Anasina Gray-Barberio Samantha Ratnam Liberal Victoria Jess Wilson MP Victorian Greens Oscar Yildiz JP Victorian Socialists

05/05/2026

03/05/2026

It’s genuinely encouraging to see Preston High School receiving the green light and funding to deliver a second high school campus (2030)—an investment that reflects the reality of its rapid growth.

What makes this story resonate is its history. This was once Preston Girls Secondary College, closed due to declining enrolments. It was only through sustained, grassroots community advocacy that it was reimagined and reopened in 2019 as the co-educational Preston High School. Since then, it has thrived.

The lesson here is clear: when governments listen to their communities—and back that insight with quality teachers, strong leadership, and proper facilities—public schools don’t just survive, they flourish. Enrolments grow because confidence grows.

Preston High is proof that thoughtful investment, grounded in community need, delivers real outcomes. It shows what’s possible when vision is matched with action—and it raises an important question about why that same approach is still missing in North Merri-bek?

Wishing the school and its community continued success as they take this next step.

Anthony Cianflone MP Kathleen Matthews-Ward MP Angelica Panopoulos Anasina Gray-Barberio Samantha Ratnam Ben Carroll MP Liberal Victoria

02/05/2026

Let's get behind our brilliant Pascoe Vale North Primary School and help secure some much needed funding. Sign the petition!!!!

Take a look at some other petitions related to causes you care about. There are many passionate individuals just like you who are working towards positive change. Signing more petitions and sharing them with your friends and family can help bring attention to important issues and create lasting impa...

29/04/2026

📌Pascoe Vale North Primary School deserves better. Full stop.

🪴For four years, Pascoe Vale North Primary has been quietly overlooked while glossy announcements and selective investments dominate the local education conversation. A single sensory garden—funded at just $91,000 back in 2019—is not a strategy. It’s a token gesture.

Meanwhile, this is a school of nearly 370 students, in a diverse community where over 40% of families speak a language other than English at home.
This is not a low-need, low-pressure environment. It is a growing, complex school community that requires real investment in modern learning spaces.

📚And this underinvestment rolls into a bigger issue: this isn’t just about one school in our local community.

Across north Merri-bek, too many primary schools are quietly carrying the same burden—aging facilities, limited upgrades, and growing demand without the infrastructure to match. Schools like Pascoe Vale north Primary, Merri-bek Primary and others across the corridor are feeling the strain, yet continue to be overshadowed by selective, high-profile projects elsewhere.

This systemic neglect flows directly into our secondary schools.

🏫 Schools like Glenroy College, John Fawkner Secondary College and Pascoe Vale Girls Secondary College are already grappling with declining enrolments, underfunding and constrained subject offerings—forcing students to move between campuses just to access a full education.

📍We are told there is a “plan.”
📍We are told there was “record consultation.”
📍We are told transformation is coming.

But families are still waiting.

📝The Merri-bek North Education Plan confirms what the community has been saying all along: parents want modern facilities, diverse subjects, and properly resourced schools.

Yet years on, meaningful change on the ground remains thin.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

You cannot fix a struggling secondary system while neglecting the primary schools that feed into it.

If children begin their education in outdated, overcrowded or under-resourced environments, inequity is baked in from day one.

📍This is how disadvantage compounds.
📍This is how confidence in public education erodes.
📍This is how families are quietly pushed out of the system.

Pascoe Vale North Primary isn’t asking for special treatment.

It is asking for fairness.

Fair funding.
Modern learning spaces.
A seat at the table.

Because right now, the pattern is clear: a handful of headline projects, while the rest of the system is left to stretch, improvise and wait.

North Merri-bek families have done everything asked of them.

📍They’ve engaged.
📍They’ve shown up.
📍They’ve participated in consultations in record numbers.

Now they deserve action.

📍Not another plan.
📍Not another announcement because an election is coming.
📍Real investment.

Because every child—whether at Pascoe Vale North Primary or any other overlooked local school—deserves the same start.

Right now, that promise is not being kept.

24/04/2026

“I know what a privileged and fortunate person I am … I had a really first-class public school education … And then I got a free university education,” says Jane Caro.

“I feel like I owe [back] for the education that I was lucky enough to get.”

In her latest essay, Rich Kid Poor Kid, Caro delivers a scathing critique of Australia’s longstanding support for private education, and the notion of ‘choice’ to the detriment of public schools, where enrolments are at record lows.

“I think it’s appalling that you can’t just go to your local public school now and feel sure that you’ll get an excellent education,” she says.

Read the full interview: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2026/apr/11/jane-caro-australian-writer-commentator-interview-education

Preorder Rich Kid Poor Kid via the Australia Institute Press online store: https://australiainstitute.org.au/store/rich-kid-poor-kid-vantage-point-issue-5?utm_campaign=booksales&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_term=SOC_Education