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.

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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.

READ MORE: 'Absolutely disgusted': learning supports cut as school budgets slashed

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........

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