A lower entrance mark for country children and handpicking students with a “passion” for agriculture are strategies likely to be seriously considered to help lift rural boarding enrolments at Sydney’s Hurlstone Agricultural High School.
A 278-page report handed to the NSW Government this week says a chronic lack of demand for boarding places at Hurlstone and neglected farm facilities at the historic selective high school could be fixed by adopting a series of basic remedies.
The report, written by a former NSW Farmers Association president, Mal Peters, recommends $13.75 million be spent at Hurlstone to turn the lagging school into a state-of-the-art agricultural institution.
It says the school’s ability to train young agricultural students would help fill the spare 800 places in agricultural university courses which now sit vacant each year.
The NSW Education Minister, Verity Firth, was expected to support the inquiry’s findings but would gauge the community’s response before making deciding.
President of the school’s council, John Corbett, this week called the report the “biggest shot in the arm” for agricultural education in years.
“You have to be buoyed by the fact the discussion has moved away from selling everything to a net gain in land and investment in infrastructure,” Mr Corbett said.
A year ago the Department of Education and Training recommended 140 hectares of the 160ha school be sold, which might have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the cash-poor State Government.
As revealed in The Land last week, the school would actually grow to 180ha if the report’s recommendations were followed and 30ha of nearby land owned by the Department of Planning was leased to Hurlstone.
The report accepts a total of 10.6ha of the school should probably be sold to raise an estimated $15 million for upgrades.
Improvements to boarder dormitories worth $5m would take a big slice of this.
The refurbishment would also need $1.8m to erect a 4000 square metre hydroponics and aquaponics glasshouse, $1 million to develop aquaculture facilities and $600,000 for equipment such as a satellite-guided tractor and computer regulated spray equipment.
About $400,000 was needed for an environmental education centre; $300,000 each for a piggery and dairy facility, and $240,000 for a four-hectare netted orchard, vineyard and vegetable plot.
An electronic weather station, global positioning system (GPS) technology, solar energy unit, plant tissue analysis equipment, turf farm and poultry shed were also on the report’s shopping list.
The document attracted critcism in advocating appointment of a farm manager who would report directly to the Department of Education and Training.
The Save Hurlstone’s Education Agricultural Property organiser, Tiffany Spiers, said the report was suggesting structurally separating the farm and placing it under the control of “the very education bureaucracy” responsible for the “under-investment” at Hurlstone.
“And that bureaucracy has tried three times in 30 years to sell off the farm in defiance of the community,” she said.
Hurlstone filled just 166 of its 300 boarding places this year, charging resident students $8000 annually.
Email a friend