Schools grappling with class 'splitting' as union flags industrial action

The Australian Education Union's ACT branch is predicting teachers and other school staff will stop work again next week after what it expects will be a resounding rejection of the government's latest pay and conditions offer.

Today, there was minimal supervision for ACT public school students between 9am and 11am as union members met to consider the offer.

AEU ACT president Angela Burroughs said a formal response to the deal would be provided next week, but a no vote meant teachers and other school staff would most likely stop work again next Thursday morning.

She said members were exhausted by "a prolonged period of inadequate resourcing" in Canberra schools and wanted a guarantee of minimum staffing levels.

"This is a workforce that is ... absolutely burnt out, but is also burned by previous commitments that were never delivered on,"

she said.

Teachers managing up to 90 kids, union says

Australia is grappling with a national shortage of teachers.

Ms Burroughs explained the profession had become "less attractive" over time as teachers weighed up potential burnout with pay and conditions.

Class 'splitting' and 'collapsing', Ms Burroughs said, was an "inevitable consequence" of teacher shortages.

Splitting is described as when a teacher is unavailable, and their students are then allocated to multiple available staff.

Collapsing is when the class cannot be split into groups, and so the whole class is placed with one teacher.

"We are seeing one teacher having to teach huge class sizes — 50, 90 in some instances — it has gotten completely out of hand," Ms Burroughs said.

"Some really experienced school leaders are telling me that they've never known it be this bad, and that includes the COVID period."

Ms Burroughs said this could lead to the "most disruptive" cases where very different year groups were mismatched.

"It is really hard for the classroom teacher to be able to meet such a diverse range of needs," Ms Burroughs said.

No data to measure problem

Representative body ACT Parents' Veronica Elliot said her organisation surveyed parents and carers at the beginning of 2026, which reported that splitting and collapsing was happening weekly to fortnightly.

She said she had also heard of students going a year without a specialist maths teacher.

"It does disrupt learning, and we know this is having a big impact on what students are able to achieve, because they just don't have a teacher in front of them," she said.

"The issue is that we really don't know how big of a problem it is, because the Education Directorate doesn't collect data on their ongoing vacancies, and also on the splitting and collapsing of classes."

She said the data was needed to understand the scale of the problem.

"And we then need to have a look at our staffing and work out how many more staff we need in our schools to prevent this from happening,"

she said.

ACT Education Directorate Director-General Jo Wood said the directorate was developing a system to show how schools were being affected.

"That automated data system will be the way that we bring visibility to that issue and then we can start to work on some really concrete systems," she said.

Ms Wood noted the effects of a declining casual workforce and increased use of leave in a post-COVID era, saying people were being encouraged to stay home when sick.

"We're in the flu season at the moment, and we're seeing more people have to access their personal leave," she said.

She said the Education Directorate had committed to working with the union and schools to better handle the issue.

"So we can identify where schools are being impacted by this type of issue, and lean in and support and help them with different solutions earlier," she said.