It’s another tough budget lesson for Education Minister Yvette Berry. Photo: ACT Government.
One suspects budget hiccups are going to keep repeating on the ACT Government.
This week, school budgets were in the spotlight, with 84 per cent of government schools over budget or expected to overspend in 2025.
The revelation came in the first week of Budget Estimate hearings and after backdowns on the health levy and the fee for the Working With Vulnerable People card.
A $1.1 billion deficit for 2024-25 means the budget is under even more pressure, and measures such as the health levy and the squeeze on the public service are designed to help put the budget back on the path to balance and eventual surplus.
Sceptics will only have their views confirmed by the school budget overruns, which should not be conflated with the ACT Health funding shortfall, but nonetheless produce an echo of a situation that necessitated a $227 million injection in January.
There will be no such top-up for the 77 schools in the red this year, apart from multi-million dollar savings to be extracted from the Directorate to cover their funding gaps.
School funding apparently has not kept pace with the needs of government schools, although the reasons for this remain somewhat vague.
Education Minister Yvette Berry suggests that since the pandemic, schools are expected to do more and deal with more complexity.
Like everywhere, they have also faced soaring costs. And, of course, there are new schools.
But Ms Berry rejects any talk of high teacher salaries – a bragging point for the ACT in a competitive environment – getting away from the Directorate.
The teachers’ union, of course, also won’t go there and is not about to dilute its imminent list of claims to give the government a hand.
Ms Berry says the government is being proactive by intervening now, but while the expected Directorate savings will cover schools this year, what about next year and into the future?
If the union is right in saying the system is broken, then the options are to cut costs, increase funding, or a combination of the two.
If schools are doing too much, then perhaps community expectations need to change so they can focus on their core business. If they are being shortchanged, then money will have to be found elsewhere in the ACT Budget to ensure they can do their job.
But please, no education levy.
Enrolments are down, so some will start questioning whether some schools are viable and should close, a suggestion Ms Berry shuts down at once.
She also insists that while the Directorate will help school principals manage their budgets, students will not see a difference in the classroom and no class will be left without a teacher.
It is also unsettling that school budgets are struggling at a time of significant and urgent reform. The Strong Foundations literacy and numeracy reforms have been budgeted for but change is difficult in a stressed environment.
Health and education are the biggest spending directorates, are obvious political priorities for the Labor Government and need to be placed on a sustainable financial footing.
It is widely accepted that the management model for government schools, which grants them significant autonomy, is outdated. The government is already moving towards greater central control to provide more administrative and financial oversight, as well as greater consistency across the system.
This new situation will only hasten that trend, which should ease administrative burdens, bring budgets under control and give parents more confidence.
The union wants an independent review of school funding to get to the bottom of the matter before the start of the 2026 school year, something the Minister is prepared to consider.
But this would not come cheaply. Do taxpayers need to foot the bill for another inquiry to tell the Minister what she and the Directorate should already know?
Probably not.
