Three things are true of the ACT public school system at the moment.

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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.

So how does the ACT's system work differently?

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........

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