'All we did was fun stuff': ACT public school system in 'crisis'

Primary school students Thea and Elvy Bundey said they have spent much of their week colouring in instead of learning.

Due to staff shortages, their classes have been combined, resulting in 63 students being in one class.

"All we did was fun stuff and I would prefer to learn and do fun stuff than just do fun stuff,"

Year 1 student Thea said.

It is a common story across public schools in the ACT, and is one of the reasons why teachers and school staff have again taken industrial action amid protracted negotiations on a new enterprise agreement.

'Teachers are leaving'

Schools across the ACT were closed for two hours on Thursday morning as Australian Education Union (AEU) members stopped work to letterbox communities about the situation.

"Frustration levels are pretty high,"

Dickson College teacher Tom Griffith said.

"Public schools are under-resourced, teachers are leaving, or we are not able to get new teachers in the profession at the rate we need them."

It is the third time schools have closed this year due to industrial action, with the first being a two-hour work stoppage in May, followed by a full-day strike in June.

There was also minimal supervision for students for two hours last week, as union members met to consider the government's latest offer.

Freya Bundey, who is also a teacher at Dickson College, said the public school system was in "crisis".

"My classes, for most of the year, have been over capacity," she said.

"If we have got less funding for students … we are going to keep haemorrhaging kids to the private sector."

Conversations about workloads 

The union's ACT branch president Angela Burroughs said the public education system was "suffering from chronic understaffing".

"We have reports from our members saying that they are supervising up to 90 students at one time — that is a system that is under immense strain,"

she said.

She flagged the potential for more industrial action later in the year, including another full-day strike, if the ACT government did not improve its offer.

Education Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said negotiations had made some progress, particularly on pay, but said there was still work to be done.

"The conversation now is about workload, it's about classroom management, it's about those split and collapsed classes, how we get better visibility of that and how we centrally better support schools to manage those teacher absences," she said.

Some schools to get less funding

While enterprise negotiations have been ongoing, there has been concern about individual school budgets and staffing levels for 2027.

A new funding model, taking effect next year, aims to address overspending and redistribute existing resources according to students' needs.

Some schools are facing a drop in their funding, but Ms Stephen-Smith said only indicative budgets have been released so far, with final allocations still to come.

"These are definitely challenging conversations, and for some schools it will be a reduction in their budget from 2026 to 2027," she said.

"It is important we get back to a fair, equitable and sustainable funding model."

Ms Stephen-Smith said an "exceptions bucket" of money would be made available to schools that struggled to meet the conditions of the new funding model.

"Every school is different, every school is facing different opportunities and different challenges," she said.

She also said she was concerned that support staff at some of Canberra's public schools had been told they might not have a job before budget decisions had been finalised.

"I was really distressed to hear that feedback about learning support assistants being given that advice at this point,"

she said.

"These are indicative budgets, and this is an ongoing conversation. There will be some changes that need to be made."