Overcrowding at ISHS 2024
The Indooroopilly State High School Parents and Citizens' Association is working extremely hard to help solve a major issue at Indooroopilly State High School: Overcrowding.
This page is here to set out the background information to the challenges currently faced at Indro High. The challenges are two-fold:
1. There is a severe shortfall in the facilities at Indro High (including the accessibility of the campus, specialist classrooms, student resources space, spaces for staff, tuck shop facilities, seating, toilets) and presently no Master Plan from the Education Department to fix it.
2. Enrolments are at 2,873 students in 2024 and set to grow. Meanwhile, the Education Department's Master Planning is targeting facilities for an enrolment capacity of only 2,500 students.
The only way forward is via credible and informed discussions and collaboration with the Education Department. This is why we set out below, the core issues and supporting data that informs them. We trust that this helps readers engage with the issues in a respectful and informed way.
We thank our incredible team of parents and specialists for their research, data analysis and engagement on this matter. If you find this information helpful, please send it to another parent or alumni who might also find it helpful.
If you have new data to share, or would like to share your experiences of the overcrowding impacts at Indro High, please contact us at president@ishspandc.org.au
Issue #1 Facilities Shortfall - Students at Indro High have significantly less access to specialist classrooms, compared with the catchment-based State High Schools next door.
There are currently 30+ demountable / temporary classrooms at the school.
This means that students at Indro High, have diluted learning opportunities. When compared with neighbouring catchment-based state high schools, Indro High has drastically less access to the specialist classrooms used for science, manual arts, hospitality and music/dance/drama.
The following uplifts would be needed in 2024 for Indro High to have the average capacity already in place for our neighbours:
* Indro High would need 5 extra Science Labs
* Indro High would need 5 extra Music/Dance/Drama classrooms
* Indro High would need 2 extra Hospitality classrooms
* Indro High would need 6 functioning Manual Arts Rooms (we technically have 4 manual arts rooms at the moment, and they wouldn't appear to meet the Department's design principles).
As enrolments grow, these essential classroom needs grow too.
The classroom shortfall comes from lagged planning for the school. The classroom and infrastructure planning for the school (called a Master Plan by the Education Department) has not kept up with the school's growth.
We are grateful for the demountable classrooms that are supplied to ease the over-crowding burden at the school. But we can't use these classrooms to teach specialist subjects like science, manual arts, hospitality, music/dance/drama. The reactive resourcing for Indro High, is diluting student exposure to learning.
Space is so restricted in these specialist classrooms that:
• year 7 students are currently unable to have any science lessons in a science lab
• year 8 students are learning about chemical reactions by watching them on videos, because there is no space to deliver lab-based learning in full
• year 11 students, after studying Biology for 18 months, still have not completed a lab experience.
How can this meet the Education Queensland vision of Excellence in Education?
Indro High would need 13 science labs to match the average allocation already provided to neighbouring State High Schools (we have 8 right now). Hospitality resourcing is lagged too. Indro High has 1 hospitality classroom for 2,873 students. Every neighbouring state high school can offer students 1.5x, 2x or 4x the hospitality classroom time compared with what Indro High is resourced with. Source: Education Queensland School’s Directory, https://schoolsdirectory.eq.edu.au/, accessed April 2024.
Indro High would need a total of 6 fully functioning manual arts rooms to have an average allocation, compared with peer schools. Indro currently has 4 dated manual arts rooms. The lack of infrastructure planning for the school means manual arts isn't an attractive offer for students, and appears not to meet the 2024 Education Queensland Design Principles.
Indro High is well behind neighbouring state high schools in its music/dance/drama room numbers too. Indro High would need 5 additional rooms in this area in 2024, to meet the average number of classrooms per student, that already exist for neighbouring state high schools. As the Indro High enrolments grow, the need also grows.