GEOGRAPHE Primary School has an unusual class this year – a quarter of the students are twins.
Julie Newman’s Year 5 class has three and a half sets of twins, which principal Tim Baker said was very unusual.
The second half of the fourth set, Tom, is a student at the Geographe Education Support Centre.
Five out of the seven students were also in the same class as each other last year.
The eight students joined nearly 700 others on their first day of the 2013 school year at Geographe on Monday, with thousands of students heading back to school across the city.
A number of schools across the region have reported less of an increase in students than they were expecting.
“There are 680 students enrolled now, last year we finished with 690 and we have accommodation for 720 kids – we also have 20 less kindy kids this year,” Tim said.
“In 2012 we grew by 40 students during the year.
“It’s really guess work, you never know what you’ll get during the year.”
A similar pattern was reported by Vasse Primary School principal Brian Devereux.
Brian said it was hard to predict when students would arrive.
“The population is growing, so it’s a matter of when the students will enrol,” he said.
Vasse Primary School now has 521 students, up from 496 at the end of last year.
The school also recorded 60 enrolments during the school year in 2012.
They also had less kindy enrolments than they expected, with only 63 enrolled, but space for up to 80.
“We find it interesting at Vasse that although we are in the midst of Vasse Newtown, there is no pattern to where our enrolments come from,” Brian said.
“They don't necessarily come from Vasse Newtown where there have been a lot of new families. The enrolments have been from around the area.
“We are expecting a number of enrolments from Vasse Newtown in the coming years.
“There are lots of families with lots of young children who will be approaching school age in the next year or two.
“With more flights going, we also see quite a lot of enrolments for fly-in, fly-out people coming from Perth. It’s quite a noticeable trend.
“We are going to need another school, or two, in Busselton and Dunsborough.”
Geographe Education Support Centre principal Ron Ng reported a rise in enrolments, with six new students, five more than they would normally expect.
The school now has 23 primary school aged students and 27 students at the high school.