The aspirational middle class in NSW have taken immediate steps to ease the financial burden imposed on them by the economic meltdown — they have removed their children from private schools and shifted them into public education.

It’s a way of keeping the Porsche on the road while the kids join the rough and tumble of state schools.

Today’s Daily Telegraph reports that in the past five years 439 private schools lost a significant number of students to the public system and the number will rise more sharply this year.

But just as the return to public transport placed huge strains on the NSW budget, so the move back to public education will test the priorities of the cash-strapped Department of Education.

Shadow Education Minister Adrian Piccoli pointed out today that long-suffering teachers and students in NSW have been forced to tolerate poorly maintained and crumbling buildings, threadbare carpets and leaky roofs.

And recent documents obtained by the Coalition under Freedom of Information reveal that there are a staggering 4,157 demountable classrooms across the state.

Originally built as emergency accommodation, many demountables have become a semi-permanent part of the state education infrastructure. They are hot, airless, over-crowded and dilapidated and no place to conduct the successful education of young minds.

In spite of almost annual announcements by recent premiers and education ministers that demountable education will be ended, the pace of eradication has been painfully slow and there is no end in sight.

Perhaps Education Minister Verity Firth and her Director-General Michael Coutts-Trotter, husband of federal minister Tanya Plibersek, should move some of the hundreds of departmental bureaucrats, paper-shufflers, duck-shovers and desk jockeys into demountables so they can learn to appreciate how many students are spending their school years.

Holding the next Cabinet meeting in a demountable classroom might also focus some attention on the problem.