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The Hon Julia Gillard MP answers your questions - Transcript

In February this year, the Prime Minister and I announced the $14.7 million Building the Education Revolution program – an unprecedented investment into the nation’s schools.

A few months later, I am very excited seeing this program coming to life and I know you’re excited too and have questions about Building the Education Revolution.

It's great to see our schools becoming hives of construction activity with tradies hard at work.

New classrooms; new libraries; new facilities in our primary schools and over 500 science and language centres in secondary schools as well as repair and maintenance work in every school around the country.

In fact, over the next 12 months, we will see over 23,000 projects around the country in Australia’s nine and a half thousand schools.

This is about supporting jobs around the country as Australia faces the global recession.

Because of the global recession, we’re acting through this program to support jobs around the country and to stimulate local economies and there’s no better way to do that than investing in school infrastructure for our nation’s future.

We believe that every Australian child in every Australian school should have access to great teachers and be able to learn in 21st century facilities.

This is a program for our schools in our cities, in remote and regional locations, for government schools and non-government schools - for every school in Australia.

To ensure that this program has maximum effect, wherever possible, local tradies have been given the work to construct our schools, and preference is being given those who retain and train apprentices.

I want to commend school communities right around the country for rising to the challenge of delivering Building the Education Revolution.

The timeframes are tight and people are working hard to deliver this program to build the infrastructure they need for this century and for supporting jobs in their community today.

I encourage you to go to our website where you will find lots more information including what other schools are doing through the Building the Education Revolution program. www.deewr.gov.au.