Three things are true of the ACT public school system at the moment.
First, it is being centralised. In May 2026, an independent review found 77 of the territory's 92 public schools running over budget, and the government responded the same day by committing to a single "one public education system" model, backed by an initial $9.3 million in the June budget.
Second, its teachers are unhappy. Bargaining has run since July 2025, a June 2026 strike was the ACT's first in 15 years, and the government's third pay offer, 9 per cent over three years, was voted down by the AEU's ACT branch within two days, which warned of further strikes in term four.
That rate is roughly half the 7-8 per cent a year Victorian teachers rejected as insufficient in June, despite the ACT government's disputed claim that its deal would make ACT teachers the best-paid outside the Northern Territory.
And last, the territory's finances leave little room to move: a $1 billion deficit in 2025-26, a $323.4 million shortfall forecast for 2026-27, and net debt heading toward $14.1 billion by 2029-30, with an infrastructure program reset to under $1 billion a year.
These read as three separate problems, a governance problem, an industrial problem, and a budget problem. But when it comes to education, they track back to one structural fact.
Canberra's public school system was designed, from the 1970s, to be world-class and revolutionary, and thereby more expensive per student and reliant on more separate sites than a comparably cost-efficient system would need.
That design was viable under conditions that are no longer present: strong Commonwealth funding, rising enrolments, and a public enrolment share well above today's. The territory is now funding that same structure under deficit, with a shrinking capital budget, a workforce that has rejected three pay offers in a row, and among the lowest and still-falling public enrolment share of any state or territory.
Where a standard Australian jurisdiction typically runs the secondary years on a single campus, Canberra's design intentionally fragmented it across a two-tier 7-10 and 11-12 model. So when a government devolves organisational autonomy into a system built like that, it doesn't drop that responsibility into the ether. It drops it onto that specific, duplicated footprint.
The ACT's school system was built by people who believed in devolution as a democratic good, more than a decade before the territory even had self-government. Canberra was ceded by NSW in 1911 and run directly by the Commonwealth for most of the century. A 1978 referendum on self-government was defeated 68-32, though the Commonwealth granted it anyway a decade later, with the first Legislative Assembly elected in 1989.
The ACT Schools Authority existed from 1973, and Hedley Beare became its founding Chief Education Officer in 1975 with an explicitly anti-bureaucratic mandate: school boards with real governance power, decisions devolved to individual schools, no external examinations.
Canberra's unique college system, separate institutions for years 11 and 12 rather than one 7-12 high school, was part of the same design: community-facing, adult-style institutions with joint-use libraries among the largest of their kind at the time. Offering two distinct institution-types per secondary student, and connecting institution to community so purposely, was deliberately world-leading and revolutionary when established and remains a point of difference and pride for Canberra.
What that vision didn't anticipate was how much of Canberra's population would eventually choose not to use it. Back in 1984, government schools captured 68 per cent of ACT students. Despite a brief recovery in the mid-2010s, that share has been sliding for the past five years, recently dropping to 59.8 per cent in 2026.
This "quiet exodus" to the non-government sector is most obvious in the middle years: while public primary schools and colleges still capture more than 62 per cent of students, public high schools hold onto just 52.4 per cent. The raw numbers make the contrast even starker. Since public enrolments peaked in 2021, the public system has lost 1222 students.
Over that same period, non-government schools gained 2904 students, a shift happening in a city that added more than 6000 new residents in 2025 alone.
On raw population alone, the ACT already runs more secondary schools per capita than any mainland capital. But raw population is a blunt comparison. It treats residents who send their children to non-government schools the same as those who use the public system, and it favours cities with large rural fringes, where geography justifies more, smaller schools.
Counting public secondary students per site avoids both problems. Across the five mainland capitals, the average government secondary site serves 866 students. If Canberra followed that national average for its 20,100 students, it would need about 23 sites. The territory actually runs 30. Having seven extra sites might not sound drastic on its own, but it represents a 30 per cent oversupply.
If you scaled that same inefficiency to a larger city, it would be the equivalent of Sydney running 56 extra high schools, or Melbourne running an extra 66.
The ACT's 30 sites include 12 high schools, eight colleges, nine K-10 schools, and one 7-12 school spread across two addresses. Even when stripping away hybrid school models to look strictly at traditional secondary schools (that is, only sites with 7-12 students), Canberra's education system is spread remarkably thin.
Across mainland Australia, the average dedicated secondary school serves about 1,032 students, meaning Canberra's student population only requires 15 schools to meet demand. Instead, the territory operates 21, creating a 43 per cent oversupply of campuses.
The site-per-student inefficiency actually looks higher the stricter we get with the data; removing K-10 schools from the equation strips 4900 students from the total headcount, leaving a huge surplus of campuses stretching resources across a surprisingly small pool of students.
Every one of those roughly seven surplus sites carries significant overhead: a principal earning around $200,000 a year, a duplicated administrative layer, and its own capital-works cycle. That is before factoring in that secondary schooling is universally the most staff-intensive, expensive tier of education to run. In fact, the ACT spent $29,578 per secondary student in 2022-23 (the highest rate in the country) with the territory funding 75 per cent of that out of its own pocket.
When you take Canberra's 20,100 public secondary students and spread them across 30 sites, each school averages about 670 students. At nearly $30,000 per head, that math implies a massive recurrent budget of around $20 million per site, per year. Despite this heavy investment in older year groups, the 2025 resourcing review found that the system's actual financial pressure is sitting in primary schools. The Directorate's solution for 2027 was simply to cut a combined $4 million from the territory's nine college budgets to redistribute downward.
Apply the same benchmark to primary schools and you see a much milder version of the same story. Counted inclusively, Canberra's 25,725 public primary students sit across 66 sites, an average of 390 against the mainland's 415.
At the national rate the territory would run 62, a surplus of four sites, or 6.5 per cent. Counted strictly, with the K-10 schools removed from every city, it runs 57 schools where the mainland rate of 411 predicts 53. Still four sites, now 8.3 per cent. Either way the primary surplus is a fraction of the secondary one. It's the two-tier secondary design, rather than the system as a whole, that Canberra pays a premium for.
Nonetheless, primary schools are where the recent resourcing review found the most financial pressure. As noted earlier, to plug the gap for 2027, the Directorate simply moved $4 million out of college budgets and into primary ones. While that eases the day-to-day strain for primary schools, structurally it saves nothing overall. It's a classic case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
So, the territory runs about seven more public secondary sites than a matched benchmark predicts, and six more primary sites. Each secondary site draws on the most expensive per-student envelope in the country, mostly reliant on the rates paid by Canberrans who are increasingly choosing to enrol their children elsewhere.
Canberra has company. Hobart, the only other capital with a separate years 11-12 college sector, has even fewer public secondary students per site: 564 to Canberra's 670.
Hobart's figures also show what happens when a two-tier system is stretched rather than consolidated. Ten government schools in Greater Hobart, outside the college sector, now enrol year 11 and 12 students, yet four colleges still teach 93 per cent of the city's public senior students.
The other 10 share 261 senior students between them, an average of 26 each. Canberra's 7130 public senior students, by contrast, sit across nine sites averaging nearly 800. Here we can see that extending high schools upward added senior sites in Hobart without removing any. We can also see why Hobart pipped Canberra on the students-per-site count earlier.
This brings us back to the disputes at the top of this piece. When a system devolves organisational autonomy to 30 separate secondary interfaces instead of 23, the cost of that autonomy isn't only an abstract policy problem. It's concrete, brick, and payroll.
That's the structural fact underneath a billion-dollar deficit and a workforce that has rejected three consecutive pay offers.
Centralising procurement and HR is one logical administrative measure, but it leaves an expensive physical footprint untouched. Pointing this out is not a demand to close schools; Canberra's two-tier secondary system was built deliberately to serve its adolescents differently, and the territory may well decide that maintaining this high-surface-area model is worth the expense.
But an honest conversation about the costs of Canberra's education system has to start by acknowledging that it comes with an inherent premium. As the ACT works out what it pays its teachers and how it balances its education budget, it also has to reckon with the mathematical reality of funding far more secondary school sites for a population base that elsewhere supports fewer.
