By 2020, Sydney will have five new high-rise and multi-storey public schools that will educate more than 6000 students at a cost of more than $200 million.
Sydney's ever denser geography has created a fundamental shift in the way we educate our children. The urgency is summed up in the Department of Education's own projections: 45,000 children will not have classrooms to go into unless capacity is rapidly expanded in the metropolitan region.
"We have waited a long time to have the funds to ensure our schools are not just leading the nation but leading the world," said NSW Premier Mike Baird last year.
"My question to the people of NSW is pretty simple: why do we have to wait for these types of schools?"
Across the city, expensive, crumbling, century-old Edwardian era schools still dominate the learning environments of Sydney's public schools, contributing to a maintenance budget of $347 million last year.
But they won't for much longer. By the end of the decade, Paramatta and the Sydney CBD will get high-rise high schools, while Alexandria Park near Green Square and Ultimo are expected to have multi-storey developments for parents who are increasingly opting to stay in the inner city.
"It is the end of the fortress school," said architect Richard Leonard.
Gone are the days of sprawling single-storey developments with football fields and playgrounds spread across hectares.
The density of the Parramatta and Sydney CBDs, and two areas of Sydney destined to become the nation's most populated, Ultimo and Green Square, simply will not allow it.
NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli said meeting demand was always going to be a significant challenge.
"Land in the inner city is always a challenge and that means putting more students onto sites," he told Fairfax Media.
The future is up, with basketball courts on rooftops, hanging gardens, flexible classrooms, online delivery and libraries that integrate with the communities they serve, not just the students they teach.
There are at least nine high-rise schools on stream across Australia, with the NSW, Victorian and South Australian governments all pursuing tenders.
Mr Leonard, a director at architecture firm Hayball, said even with the streamlined spaces, schools can no longer think of themselves as gated communities, a concept that was debated at the Learning Environments Australasia Conference in Melbourne this week.
"We are going to have to get used to a different idea of what school is," he said.
"We have to rethink how the school can share with the city and how the city can be part of the school by using public parks, gymnasiums and the community getting use of the school facilities like art rooms and technology spaces."
Sydney has at least three private high-rise schools. The first, St Andrew's Cathedral school, was built next to Sydney's Town Hall in 1976 and International Grammar and Macquarie Grammar have followed since. All have championed integrating the benefits of the urban classroom into their learning.
But the biggest movers in the public school space remain overseas. The E3 school in San Diego is one of them. Housed in the city's public library, it has classes that collaborate with the city's museums, health-care facilities and internships in the city's corporate headquarters.
Public education advocates, such as Trevor Cobold of Save Our Schools, remain concerned that high rises will sacrifice crucial playing space, light and enough greenery for children.
Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore agrees. She has long championed the need for more schools but only "provided children have access to open space".
Fortunately, for the 6000 students of Sydney's five future schools, all are within walking distance to parks. That is no guarantee for the next batch, which will have to be built within short order if population planning projections are any indication.
A much bigger hurdle, said Mr Leonard, is convincing parents of their children's security if efforts are made to integrate activities with the community.
"That is a big step for parents to make," he said. "The control model, the protection of kids, is a very difficult issue, but one that we have to tackle," he said.
