Stephen Buckley

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Canterbury College 20-Year Campus Master Plan | September Holidays Construction Work Begins

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Canterbury College 20-Year Campus Master Plan | September Holidays Construction Work Begins

Dear Canterbury Families,

Canterbury College has a 20-Year Campus Master Plan to keep our school up-to-date, and providing all the facilities our students need to succeed, and our parents and carers demand for their children.

We spent 2021-22 working with stakeholders – parents, carers, students, staff and community leaders – via meetings, surveys and direct communications, to gather your feedback and priorities for this Master Plan.

Ever since then, the highly experienced project architects and design team at Rohrig Constructions, have been meticulously planning and steadily turning this document into reality.

You have probably seen, used, or your children have enjoyed, some of the first stages already:

• 90 added Aquatic Centre, Sports Hall and High Road Gate carparks.
• New Aquatic & Tennis Centre footpaths to the Junior School and Secondary School campuses.
• Fully renovated D Block Year 6 Learning Centre with five new GLAs: General Learning Area classrooms, new Learning Commons, and a new staff space.
• Five fully refurbished Early Learning Centre classrooms and relandscaped outdoor play areas.

Now I am very pleased to announce that construction work for our large new Junior School C Block classroom building has been approved to commence these September Holidays.

Firstly, it involves onsite electrical pre-works, and you will see safety barriers around the Junior School campus, to keep our Early Learning Centre and Outside School Hours Care operating through the holidays.

Working with the Department of Education, we have received their approval for all interim arrangements and our Safety Management Plan for the ELC and OSHC.

MUST READ: Major Campus Construction Zone Changes | September School Holidays: OSHC – Vacation Care & Early Learning Centre News Story.

However, there are construction realities that I kindly ask all parents, carers and students to prepare for, and be patient around, with a long-term campus improvement viewpoint:

• Access through the Junior School campus will be interrupted over the next 10 months. Paths and stairwells will be in and out of action. There will be new (and sometimes frustrating) routes between buildings, which can be difficult to get used to. Constructing a building of this scale in the centre of the Junior School is challenging, but with lateral thinking and strong risk management, we can navigate this.
• It will be noisy and all Junior School classrooms will be affected by varying degrees. Although our contractors are fully aware they are working around 700 primary students and 40 staff trying to learn and teach, there is no way of guaranteeing there won’t be a level of construction noise on most days.
• Carparking for parents, carers and staff needs to be removed from the whole right-hand side of the main Easterly Street roundabout entrance. Drop-offs and pick-ups will be consolidated via the High Road gate. Further changes to streamline traffic through the High Road carpark will be made these holidays. Unfortunately, this major inconvenience is totally unavoidable, so please allow extra time for drop-offs and pick-ups when school resumes on Tuesday 3 October. Your patience is appreciated.
• Demolition of classrooms B15-20 will be the first step in this project, with every safety protocol adhered to. This will be a complex process and we will notify all concerned as it is about to occur.
• Canterbury OSHC will keep operating throughout this construction work, but with an altered footprint in a different location at F Block - opposite our Yalburru Community Café, during the school holidays only.
• The Junior School Meadow will be 80% out of operation for the next 10 months. So a new supervised play zone has been established between Care Central and the Kitchen Garden, to provide more open space for our Prep and Year 1 students in particular.
• Some other changes may be needed, outside our control, that will require some adjustments, that we haven’t yet anticipated. So we appreciate your flexibility and understanding if and when they arise.

Director of Property and Works Mr Lee Ryan and his Facilities Team, will keep us abreast of any critical information over the next 10 months, for us to share onto you.

Now Bareibunn is a Yugambeh verb for ‘dream’.

So for our new Junior School precinct, we believe this is the perfect word to describe our intent for our youngest learners.

Construction Project Scope:

• Eight new C Block classrooms for Years 1 and 2.
• New staffroom, plus new staff and student bathrooms.
• A specialist multipurpose STEAM: Science Technology Engineering Arts Mathematics classroom.
• A specialist Performing Arts classroom for Dance and Drama.
• A specialist Junior Primary Library engineered to foster a love of reading.
• A new COLA: COvered Learning Area large enough to accommodate hundreds of students to play during wet weather, and for Junior School gatherings, assemblies and outdoor events.
• Demolition of classrooms B15-20, and then after C Block is completed, further partial demolition of classrooms B13-14, and the relocation of the Canterbury Kitchen Garden.
• New landscaping of the Junior School Meadow, complete with new playground equipment.

This is an exciting moment for our school, with much needed modernisation of some of our oldest 30-year-plus classrooms.

So thank you in advance for your patience and understanding over the coming ten months.

Again, please allow extra time for drop-offs and pick-ups when school resumes on Tuesday 3 October.

Kind regards,

Mr Dan Walker
College Principal

Added Q&As:

What’s coming after the Bareibunn Junior School Precinct is finished?

We will be replacing older Secondary buildings over the next decade with classrooms engineered for more flexible and blended modern learning, while adding group education spaces called Learning Commons.

Canterbury will expand its Early Learning Centre to cater for babies and infants, using a brand new facility to be built over the next two to three years.

The Master Plan also identifies opportunities for more carparking spaces, better student drop-off and pick-up traffic flows, refurbishing of older buildings, plus annexes or extensions to existing buildings – such as Prep classrooms, and our Secondary School Creative Industries, Science and Health Sciences Precincts.

Why is all this necessary?

Firstly, the lion’s share of our classrooms were built in the late 80s and early 90s – over 20-30 years ago.

So there is a need to create fresh and comfortable classroom environments that inspire today’s students and teachers to be their very best, and maintain Canterbury as one of the leading Logan private schools.

Secondly, Canterbury’s current 1,562 student population is growing steadily, but will reach a natural ‘cap’ of just over 1,700 students from Prep to Year 12 by about year 2028.

Our growth has quickened over the past five years in particular, and these new larger facilities are necessary to accommodate this bigger student population, and the staff to teach and support them.

Finally, we know parents’ expectations around the quality of our physical infrastructure continue to rise.

So we are committed to ensuring a high standard applies to our all-important classrooms, facilities and learning commons, and connecting them to our natural 33-hectare bushland environment.

Together they will inspire and nurture our students, families and staff for many years to come.

by Stephen Buckley