section_path: Early life/Childhood and education
section_name: Childhood and education
paragraph_text: Childhood and education
  
  Albanese grew up with his mother and maternal grandparents in a Sydney City Council home in the Inner West suburb of Camperdown, opposite the Camperdown Children's Hospital. His grandfather died in 1970, and the following year his mother married James Williamson. He was given his stepfather's surname, but the marriage lasted only ten weeks, as Williamson proved to be an abusive alcoholic. Albanese's mother worked part-time as a cleaner but suffered from chronic rheumatoid arthritis, with the family surviving on her disability pension and his grandmother's age pension.
  
  Albanese attended St Joseph's Primary School in Camperdown and then St Mary's Cathedral College. While at school, he worked part-time selling newspapers. He captained St Mary's on several episodes of the children's game show It's Academic in 1978. Albanese joined the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in 1979 at the age of 15, as a member of Young Labor. He subsequently helped found a Labor Club at his high school.
  
  After finishing school, Albanese worked briefly at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia before enrolling in an economics degree at the University of Sydney. There, he became involved in student politics and was elected to the Students' Representative Council (SRC). He stood unsuccessfully for the SRC presidency in 1983, losing to Belinda Neal. It was also there where he started his rise as a key player in the ALP's Labor Left. During his time in student politics, Albanese led a group within Young Labor that was aligned with the left faction's Hard Left, which maintained "links with broader left-wing groups, such as the Communist Party of Australia, People for Nuclear Disarmament and the African National Congress ".