The Queensland Government has funded the Queensland School for Travelling Show Children (QSTSC) that have moved around Australia with the carnivals educating the kids of carnival workers through their primary school years. A number of portable classrooms moved around on the back of trucks and set up in the schoolyards of the towns the carnival was in.
This service was cut in the recent Queensland budget. You could argue that it is not the Queensland Government’s responsibility to educate kids all over Australia, but education is a state function and someone needed to step up. Here’s a newspaper article on the mobile school and below is a news segment about the closure.
The parents in the segment have a different view of distance education compared to the positive slant placed on it by the Education Department (Media Release)
I can see this sort of mobile school being used in other areas. Across Central Australia there are large movements of people for cultural business or sorry business through the year. Having extra education resources driving into a remote community to support the small remote schools and be able to keep kids in school where ever they are could be one small way to help with “Closing the Gap” on education.
But what’s the chance of it even being trialled as South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory would have to work together.