The minister has not ruled out extending the ban to include other schools in the inner city as it deals with a chronic shortage of spaces. Executive director of NSW Public Schools Murat Dizdar told Ultimo Public School last month that the school would be rebuilt on the same site. Credit:Eryk Bagshaw A spokesman for Mr Piccoli said that where

At the meeting Mr Piccoli suggested the catchment areas for rapidly filling schools in the CBD and Glebe could be widened to accommodate residents from Sydney's most densely populated area around Ultimo and Pyrmont. He said parents could send their children to Fort Street Primary School, which only has 10 teaching staff on its books, is more than three kilometres away and has almost doubled its enrolments over the past half a decade. It was also suggested that other pupils could attend Glebe Primary School, which has some capacity despite enrolments surging 55 per cent over the past five years.

Opposition education spokeswoman Linda Burney said the government was planning on the hop. "Widening the catchment is a band-aid solution," she said. Mr Piccoli made the proposal in a bid to quell tension at the school after the government misled the community on a much-needed 1000-place primary school on the corner of Fig and Wattle streets in Ultimo. In June, Fairfax Media revealed the Department of Education deliberately ignored advice from consultant McLachlan Lister Hill and overstated the recommended remediation cost by $22 million, according to its own report. The extra cost was accrued through the government's plan to fully remediate the contaminated site despite McLachlan Lister-Hill's recommendation for a lower level of decontamination. Mr Piccoli said the health and safety of students was paramount.

"Surely no one could accept a second-rate remediation that would mean continuous venting of noxious gases on this small site," he said. The NSW Department of Education has previously acknowledged the current Ultimo site does not have the capacity to accommodate future growth. It is a similar story across Sydney's inner-city primary schools, where a shortage of places is leading to a crisis situation, says Sydney MP Alex Greenwich. Leaked Department of Education documents obtained by Fairfax Media in September revealed that the government had a $7 billion shortfall and could no longer guarantee every child would be able to access education of the highest quality under current arrangements.

Almost 3000 extra students have come under the watch of the NSW Public Schools executive director for the Ultimo metropolitan area since then. A source at the Department of Education acknowledged it had a major shortfall. "When they got down exactly how many schools we needed, that came as a shock," the source said. "The department has not had a good handle on its asset strategy for many years." Ultimo and Fort Street are the only two public primary schools in the area, which could see up to 16,000 dwellings built around Pyrmont over the next decade as 23,000 workers and residents flood into Barangaroo each day.