That was the message that emerged on Tuesday night at a community meeting to discuss the need for a school in the village. 

CEO of NSW School Infrastructure Anthony Manning and Group Director of Planning and Strategy John Neish attended the meeting and confirmed that the ‘cluster planning’ phase for a school was beginning and that updates would be issued throughout. 

“We’re happy to come back with the data to explain how it all works,” Mr Manning said. 

“It’ll [the cluster planning phase] be finished by the middle of next year, and midway through that process we’ll come back and talk to you about where we’re going, what it means, how it works.”

The pair confirmed that Murrumbateman was high on the priority list of locations for potential schools. 

“We are planning right now. To put that in context, we have … 2,200 schools to plan for across the state,” Mr Neish said. 

“We’re starting schools community planning, and in our first 15 school community plans, it’s Yass Valley and Murrumbateman that we’re looking at.”

The need for a school in Murrumbateman has been evident for many years, but has become particularly drastic in the period of time between the last two censuses, which revealed average annual population growth of over five percent in the village. 

This rate is expected to skyrocket over the next few decades if the Yass Valley Settlement Strategy is implemented. However Yass Valley councillor and member of the Murrumbateman Progress Association Mike Reid sees a potential barrier to that growth. 

“What’s gonna stop our growth now? The fact that we haven’t got a school,” Mr Reid said. 

“There are a lot of people who are not coming to Murrumbateman right now, and they’re making options to look at somewhere else [with a school].”

Despite the respite offered by the new Fairley development’s before and after-school care programs, the current number of primary school aged children in Murrumbateman stands at nearly 500. 

Any population growth in the near future is likely to heap the pressure on parents and schools to accommodate growing competition for places. 

“For us trying to get kids into kindergarten in the ACT … we aren’t getting any places. It’s causing a lot of angst, a lot of stress for the community,” organiser of the meeting Kate Olsen said. 

“The need is now, we wanna plan now.” 

Ms Olsen has taught at schools in both the ACT and Yass, while also raising four children – three of whom are below school age. 

She admitted that “it’s great they took the opportunity to come and meet us as real families.”

However, she believes that the department’s priorities still lie with Sydney, despite Mr Manning’s and Mr Neish’s claims otherwise. 

“We want a school in the next year, but it’s not going to happen in their eyes,” Ms Olsen said. 

“As much as they tried to say they don’t prioritise Sydney, they do.”