campusreview.com.au
Community Garden artist impression | Photo: Tectura Architects
haven’t had post-secondary educational
opportunities available to them for a while
now. And if you don’t fully integrate into the
community, they don’t get the motivation
to seek things beyond Year 12. We think it’s
important that the entire community get
involved in making sure we get the right
sort of whole-of-life education in the area.
How are you involving the community?
For a start, we are going to create a new
community library in the centre of the facility
– the Lilydale Community Library. We’re also
creating a new integrated early childhood
and kindergarten centre. The council has
agreed to move its maternal and child
health services people into that facility, so
it’s not just for students but for anyone in the
community. This puts them in the main bit
of the campus with a fully integrated facility
and access to all of the council services, right
across the road from the library.
Attached to that, we’ll create a
community centre, so we’ll have a facility
with a good classy cafe and a crèche
attached to the library. Then a range of free
educational seminars for the public will be
run in an attached theatre.
We will also have onsite accommodation,
which will allow us to run school camps.
Rather than just keeping that for international
students or something like that, we’ve
decided we need an alternative site for high
school camps and study masterclasses.
In addition, we’re going to put one of
the [Victorian] Government’s new tech
schools on the site. The key bit of the tech
schools is the Discovery Centre, which is
focused on future emerging careers and
technologies, so we can start exciting kids
about them at a younger age. To do that,
you need to excite the parents. Attaching
the tech school to a community library
allows us to start engaging the parents, thus
the students as they come through school.
Kidzania artist impression | Photo: Tectura Architects
You’ve mentioned a lot of links to the
community, but what links will this new
campus have with industry for graduates?
Everything we do at Box Hill, we try to keep
tied to industry. As a vocational institution,
those industry links are critical to us.
We’re already working with several industry
partners, and we’re also seeking new ones.
Because we’ll make this campus heavily
focused on sustainability, it will work in quite
well with both the government’s thrust
around food as a future industry in the state
and [the agribusiness in the Yarra Valley area].
We run the only bachelor’s degree in
biosecurity. We’ll move that from our Elgar
campus out to Lilydale, because that plus
our bachelor’s degree in sustainable built
environments makes a nice pinnacle for the
lower level courses as they come through
in those areas.
One of the reasons the Lilydale campus
was mothballed was that the previous
government withdrew funding. In light of
this, how are you going to make this campus
self-sufficient?
The whole point when we put the model
together was to make sure we came up with
something financially sustainable. The way to
do that, for us, is to make sure there are other
revenue streams that are education-related
to help underpin the cost.
For example, the cafe will be run by
students. We’ll have a professional manager
in place, but the café and restaurant will
be run by students. The accommodation,
the bookings, the managing of
accommodation and the events managed
on the site, will be run by students. They’ll
have practical work placements that are
being paid for as apprentices, as well as the
educational opportunities. Those things will
earn some underpinning revenue for us.
The childcare centre will be something
that will create a surplus, which will help
underpin the cost of running courses in a
thin market.
If you’re trying to offer a broad range of
courses, which you need to do, many of
those courses won’t have numbers high
enough to make them sustainable. So we
need to underpin those costs by earning
some associated revenue in ways that
employ the students as well.
This campus contains an education theme
park. Can you tell us more about that?
We’re in negotiations at the moment for a
licence for a particular one that we want, so
I can’t say too much about it just yet.
The negotiations are still at a reasonably
sensitive stage, but if you think of
something like a mini science works that
is career-themed, which would feed
into the Discovery Centre, with its future
technologies, that’s sort of on the track.
The idea is to give more primary school
kids a chance to focus on future skills and
careers in a simple form, while approaching
education in an entertaining way.
If we can get them focused on future
careers at that age, then we can try to
move them to the Discovery Centre when
they’re in junior high school, and then into
vocational programs as part of their senior
high. That will stream them nicely into both
vocational and higher education programs.
Obviously a lot of work and planning has
gone into this relaunch. Overall, how are
you hoping it will be received?
We’re excited about Lilydale. It’s in an
area that hasn’t had an opportunity to do
some of this stuff for a while. The campus
itself allows us to do something much
more comprehensive than just reopening
what was there. It gives us a chance to do
something unique, sustainable and focused
on sustainability in education. We think it’s
going to be fun. ■
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