Group of Australian teachers seek crowd-funding support to open new school in Melbourne

A group of Melbourne teachers has turned to crowd-funding to help establish a new school and solve overcrowding in inner-city classrooms, they announced on Tuesday.

Having already received money from private donors, the teachers have set up a public campaign for the last 1.6 million U.S dollars needed to open the school by February 2016.

If successful, the group hopes the independent secondary school will be established in a disused soap factory just outside Melbourne's CBD in an industrial area slated for a residential overhaul.

Co-founder and principal Dr Jeanne Shaw told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Tuesday that families in the Port Melbourne area had the option of sending their children to " overcrowded, overflowing" schools or move to other areas of Melbourne.

"So a group of us thought, now lawyers set up their own law firms and doctors set up their own practices, why can't a group of teachers set up their own school?" Shaw said.

Shaw said the Sandridge School, in the suburb of Port Melbourne, would begin with years seven and eight next year before expanding to cater for both primary and secondary students.

"We're going to start with a secondary (school) because there's no secondary school in Port Melbourne or in the Docklands at the moment," she said.

The property was secured on "generous terms" from a company building a residential development in the area.

The money raised from crowd-funding site, Pozible, from Friday will be used to outfit the building.

The teachers hope the figure reaches the 1.6-million mark before the end of the month in order to open for the 2016 school year.

"We really see the need as urgent," Shaw said.

"We've got everything ready to roll and we've got the building and we've got the curriculum and we've got the teachers all lining up to teach there." Endi