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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-12-03 Daily Xml
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Building Better Schools Program

Mr BOYER (Wright) (15:00): My question is to the Minister for Education. How many schools that received Building Better Schools grants under the previous Labor government have been told to return some of these funds to the education department?

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Minister for Education) (15:00): I thank the member for the question. The Labor Party never 'gave' money to any of the schools. The Labor Party identified commitments for infrastructure, and those commitments are now continuing under the Liberal Party, of course enhanced by a series of decisions that have been proceeded with through the course of the last 2½ years since we came to government. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been further added to the investment in infrastructure in our schools across South Australia.

That program is continuing—indeed, I think from the first announcement in 2017, when the member for Port Adelaide was the minister, of the first batch of those projects. I stand to be corrected, but I think Le Fevre High School will be the first school to have their project completed. I don't think it's too far away. I am told that it should definitely be completed either by or during the first term next year.

Obviously, there will be reconciliations at the end of those projects. I am told that the vast majority of schools that are due to be completed before term 1 in 2022 will be completed through the course of next year. During estimates, I identified that there are six schools where that completion date is in December next year. The risk we are concerned about there is that the whole project, including landscaping, all the legal work and everything else, might not potentially be completed by January 2022.

In those cases, my advice is that all the work that needs to be done to ensure that the school can have a terrific start to the year will be done. All the classrooms, all the flexible learning areas and all the specialist learning areas will well and truly be completed in that time, but there may be examples of schools where we are hard up against it. We are on track to finish all the landscaping and all that other work by the end of next year, but that is where there is some risk of there being some further issues; however, we will make sure that the schools are ready to go, and we are optimistic that all that extra work will be done too.

Those funding commitments remain. A good many of the projects we are working towards are indeed underway now. I think more than $1 billion-worth of projects are now underway. In more than 60 schools construction is happening and the final scoping work is happening in the remaining 30 or so.

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