Brisbane primary school to close to make way for high school students
Children who had started at St Mary of the Cross but cannot finish there have been offered free tuition in the first term of 2027 at other local Catholic schools, and free school uniforms, to compensate for the inconvenience.
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BCE said there was capacity for them to move to Holy Cross at Wooloowin, which is less than 1km away, St Columba’s at Wilston and St Ambrose’s at Newmarket.
A firm date for the high school to open was yet to be locked in, with state approvals pending.
As recently as 2021, St Mary of the Cross declared in its annual plan that it was focused on “building enrolments and marketing to the community”.
The document listed increased enrolments and local families seeing the school as a “viable Catholic schooling option” as its success measures. But total enrolments had hovered around 100 in recent years, and were understood to have fallen to 73.
From year five – when Catholic colleges such as Gregory Terrace and Nudgee begin taking their youngest students – the Windsor school’s cohorts dropped, in some years, to single digits.
While there are dozens of Catholic high schools on Brisbane’s northside, many are single-sex and, for some families, prohibitively expensive.
Tuition fees for Nudgee College, for instance – which is run independently, and is not part of BCE – can cost more than $21,000 each year, whereas the BCE-run co-ed Holy Spirit at Fitzgibbon costs about a third as much.
