Bayview St Campus

Bayview Street The former Point Gellibrand Girls School is the setting for Years 7, 8 and 9. There is a new, state of the art building which has allowed us to run as an environmentally sustainable school. The spacious surroundings and proximity to the Bay make this site ideal for the Middle Years and our Marine Biology Program. In 2005, the Department of Education, the Victorian Government and the Williamstown High School community committed to redevelop the school. It was to be a model school for environmental education, both in its built form and in the curriculum offered to students. The school’s vision for this project was threefold:

To take up the challenge of providing for a sustainable future
To build an outstanding Middle Years School for environmental education
To inspire involvement in environmental programs that will engender excitement, pride and knowledge of Victoria’s environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llAspGXT-6o Our challenge was to not only design an environmentally sustainable campus, but to use the build environment as a learning resource for the students. This concept informed every stage of the design process and enhanced rather than inhibited the final outcome. Some of the ways this was achieved are as follows:

Providing a highly visible non-PVC rainwater collection system, used for toilet flushing and irrigation.
Designing vegetable gardens and composting facilities.
Creating a landscape journey via indigenous coastal planting through the site and a wetland to provide a direct link between the school and local ecologies.

A measure of this project’s achievement is that it has been selected as one of six educational facilities in Australia to be used as a pilot project for the new GBCA Green Star Education Rating Tool. It is the only example of a built school utilising the tool and was designed when the Green Star Office Tool was in its infancy. The development and implementation of WHS has been a catalyst for change in the Victorian public school community. The utilisation of passive environmental principles and well-tested elements used in innovative ways, rather than cutting edge technologies, has provided an accessible and economical model for use in future schools. The wide ranging publicity and interest in the school demonstrates the extent to which this building project has engaged the community. WHS has been featured in local newspapers and has been presented at various forums including the Green Cities Conference (Sydney) 2008, RMIT Sustainable Design Conference 2007 and the AGM of Secondary School Principals 2008.