More than 50,000 VCE students and staff need to get two vaccination doses by October 5 when they sit the General Achievement Test.Despite calls for priority vaccination for final students and their teachers first made many months ago, priority places were only announced last week.A phone line to facilitate bookings by students and VCE teachers and assessors opened at 8am on Monday.While some students managed to get on hold and got though after half an hour or so, thousands either got the engaged signal or were told to disconnect and call back.By 9am callers were not even getting a busy signal, with the line dropping out.Some parents said they were told the number was “unavailable”, others had calls drop out after half an hour on hold and others were told: “Due to a high volume of calls, we are unable to take your call, please call later”.The phone line was billed as the cornerstone of the government’s VCE vaccination strategy.Parents expressed their frustration at the service in year 12 chat groups, with one saying: “Surely they could do better than this”, “Have they not learnt from past rollouts?” and “Seriously!”The phone number is 1800 434 144.
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