Name: Mansfield State School
Time: 1970 - Current
Epoch: Late 20th Century
Category: State Primary School
Institution Category: Education
Institution Group: Primary
Coordinates: -27.5423233, 153.1082176
Street Address: 174 Ham Rd, Mansfield QLD 4122
Suburb: Mansfield
Sector: State
Local Study Area: Mansfield-Wishart
Study Stage: MBSH Stage 3 Local Study Areas
In 1957 Queensland education was reshaped by the Department of Education which replaced the colonial era Department of Public Instruction, which in Queensland stagnated into the first half of the twentieth century. Under the Education Act of 1875, Queensland had a modern outlook whereby:
Primary education for children aged from 6 to 12 was to be compulsory.(This provision was not fully implemented until 1900.)
Education was to be secular, i.e. under the control of the State. (Inconformity with this policy, all assistance to non-vested schools was withdrawn in 1880.
Primary education was to be free.
A Department of Public Instruction was established to administer the Act.
Yet the stagnated curriculum was instrumentalist to the needs of the state’s agrarian economy and emerging tourist industry, and overall intellectually impoverished. The centrepiece of the old model was the Scholarship examination. Many educators believed that because some teachers treated Scholarship passes as their main goal, the examination unduly restricted the content and methods of primary education. Others felt that the examination limited the opportunities of many children to receive a secondary education. In the late 1850s and early 1960s increasingly rapid social change encouraged the Department to free schools from the bonds of the Scholarship examination, and the Government’s plan, after 1957, to make secondary education freely available to all children was an added reason for abolishing the examination.
The abolition of the Scholarship examination in 1963, and the passage of the State Education Act 1964 which replaced the 1875 Act and its amendments, marked the beginning of a new age in primary education. An extensive revision of the syllabuses was carried out, with new syllabuses introduced in mathematics (developed in 1966–68 and again in 1974–76), science (1966 and 1975–76), language arts (1974–75), social studies (1870–71), art (1972), health and physical education (1972) and music (1974).
Geographic Description 1: Outside The Green Belt
Geographic Description 2: Bulimba Creek
Geographic Description 3: Flood Gullies; Ridgelines (Short); Hills
Entry extracted from Queensland Department of Education document, Primary Education, undated.
Mansfield State School, Brisbane, May 1970. Queensland State Archives, Digital Image ID 25819