‘We’ve got the message’: Bayside backflips on kinder hub plan after parent revolt

Bayside City Council has unanimously abandoned a plan to replace two long-standing community kindergartens with a centralised “super site” after political pressure and a mass protest by local parents.

Councillors voted 7-0 on Tuesday night to reject an officer recommendation to scrap expansion plans at Hampton Community Kindergarten (HCK) and Helen Paul Kindergarten.

The two kindergartens currently provide a combined total of 66 places for the Hampton area, with each site restricted to a single room of 33 children. The area is expected to have a shortfall of 235 places by 2036, which officers had hoped to solve by building a new 132-place integrated children’s centre at Castlefield Reserve. The officers had suggested the council could then sell off or repurpose one of the older kinder sites.

Dozens of parents and children protested at the council meeting on Tuesday. They also submitted a 600-signature petition pulled together in 72 hours, after the council released the plan six days before the meeting. Parents and kinder teachers told The Age they feared the large facility, catering to 132 children across four rooms, would be a multi-storey “factory” for their children compared with their small neighbourhood kinders.

“This is a community telling you loudly and clearly that you got this wrong,” Hampton Community Kindergarten president and parent Eloise Stark told the meeting. “A large, centralised, big-box facility that removes everything families actually value about early childhood education.”

HCK, which leases its small building from the council but is a separate entity, initially requested funds from the council in the last budget to add a portable extension onto its one-room building two years ago.

However, council officers recommended against this one-room extension, saying it would be poor value for money to put extensions on existing kinders, rather than building a new one. They said the small HCK site was already short of required car parks and couldn’t ever provide the three-room minimum now recommended by the state government without complete demolition and a two-storey rebuild.

Instead, they proposed a transition to an integrated “hub” model at Castlefield Reserve (Ludstone Street) that would create up to 132 places and include maternal and child health services. The report flagged this could allow the council to eventually sell the HCK and Helen Paul Kinder sites. This hub would be future-proofed beyond 2035, attracting the highest possible state funding (up to $9 million).

But Hampton Community Kindergarten director Emily Millward said the community feared losing the intimate feel of small kinders with volunteer-parent boards.

“They actually want small local community kinders,” Millward said. “They love when they get to community kinder, and they do have that small community feel.”

Millward argued that a hub servicing 132 children a day would be too large for the current volunteer-parent committee management model to oversee, probably leading to “commercialised management”.

The feasibility report underpinning the recommendation by the council staff was marked confidential meaning it was not shared publicly before the meeting.

Liberal MP for Brighton James Newbury, who joined the rally outside the Sandringham Council chambers, described the proposal as “totally ham-fisted” and “offensive”.

The successful alternative motion, moved by councillor Elli Murray, commits the council to maintaining the existing assets and “immediately” engaging with both kinders to collaboratively plan for their expansion. The councillors also voted to release the confidential feasibility report to the public.

Murray apologised to the community for the “distress, anger and frustration” caused by the proposal. “It is fair to say, I think that we’ve got the message – these kinders will not close,” she said.

Councillors used the debate to blame the state government’s “Best Start, Best Life” reforms, which will require 30-hour weeks for four-year-olds and 15-hour weeks for three-year-olds by 2036, for their conundrum. Existing one-room kinders will not be able to manage this load, and the mayor noted that upgrading all community kinders to meet the new three-room standards would cost ratepayers $65 million.

Councillor Robert Irlicht challenged Newbury to match his rhetoric with a funding commitment from the opposition before November’s state election.

“If the member feels so strongly to campaign on this … then the expectation is clear,” he said. “He is committing that a future coalition government will fund kindergarten infrastructure in Bayside.”

Newbury told The Age: “We know that Labor has left a multimillion-dollar neglected shortfall in funding our Bayside kinders and our community knows that the Liberal Party, who are in opposition, will always do everything we can to back them in.”

Minister for Children Lizzie Blandthorn has been approached for comment.

Council data identifies the Hampton and Hampton East area as the highest-deficit zone for kindergarten places in the municipality.

A further report on how to deliver increased services at “no cost” to Bayside ratepayers is expected by December 2027.

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