Education Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith says principals "should not have been surprised" to see changes to their budgets, as the Education Directorate follows through on the school resourcing review's recommendations.
Perhaps not. But for the parents, teachers and students at the schools affected, the surprise isn't that cuts are coming - it's that the government still hasn't fronted the community to explain what's actually being cut, and why.
Public school principals are being left to deliver that news themselves, absorbing decisions made somewhere else. That is no way to run an education system or to develop "one public education system" as suggested by the review.
A government cannot outsource its decision-making and then outsource the blame for it too.
The scale of what's happening deserves far more scrutiny than it's getting.
Forty ACT public schools are receiving budget cuts this round, 18 of them by more than 5 per cent. Even a cut of 1 per cent can mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars from a school's budget. That's enough to end a program, cut a support position, or guarantee classes will be split or collapsed when a teacher is absent as there's no in-built staffing cover.
Framing this as "only 18 schools" losing more than 5 per cent understates what's actually happening across the system: 40 school communities are being told to do more with less, and it's their principal, not the minister, standing at the front of the room explaining why.
To be clear, the AEU supports equitable resourcing and properly staffed schools.
Redirecting resourcing to where it's needed most was a genuine recommendation of the independent school resourcing review, and the minister is right that reallocation itself shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has read it.
But redistribution was never meant to substitute for adequate investment - the review's own report was blunt that, given the number of schools already over budget, there was no scope to rebalance within the existing funding envelope.
A $52 million, 7 per cent reduction is not "rebalancing". It's a cut, and the government should call it one.
Part of the reason principals are left holding this alone is that the review itself is unfinished. The resourcing review has not yet delivered a settled operating model for ACT public schools.
Until it does, cutting and adjusting will keep happening piecemeal, school by school, year by year - an ad hoc operating environment in which principals absorb the impact of a system the government has not yet finished designing.
That is not a sustainable way to run public education, and it is not fair to the principals asked to manage it.
That matters because of what these cuts actually touch: inclusive education practices, curriculum offerings, student support programs for wellbeing and learning and class sizes. These are not abstract line items - they are the difference between a student getting the support they need and a student going without.
When a program disappears or a class is collapsed, it is the principal fielding the questions from parents and staff. It should be the minister, publicly, explaining why an inclusive education practice is no longer viable at a given school, or why a curriculum offering has been cut. That's what accountability looks like. Right now, we're getting the opposite: a government making the decisions and a principal wearing the consequences.
Ms Stephen-Smith has said she wants "every local public school to be an excellent first choice for every family". That is an ambition we share. But excellence cannot be built on schools scrambling to cover classes, principals making impossible choices between programs and staffing, and teachers routinely absorbing extra students because there is nobody available to take them.
Of the 25 recommendations in the resourcing review, the government has been fast to move on the ones that let it cut and redeploy and been far slower on finishing the model that would give schools certainty, and communities transparency.
The government cannot promise excellence on one hand while reducing the resources schools have to deliver it on the other. If these changes are genuinely about building a stronger and more equitable public education system, the government should front the community and explain how - school by school, cut by cut.
The ACT government needs to stop outsourcing responsibility for its own decisions and implement its own review with fidelity.
Front the community. Explain the $52 million being cut from school budgets. And stop asking our public-school principals to carry a burden that was never theirs to carry.
