Principals have 'extremely healthy' scepticism over school budgets due next week

Résumé détaillé

Education Directorate to work across the weekend to finalise budgets.

Each public schools' budget will be published online as principals express scepticism about the rapid process that could result in funding cuts.

Principals have been asked to submit a risk assessment on the impact of their new budgets by Friday in anticipation of receiving their final budget projections by Monday, November 16.

Australian Education Union ACT branch president Angela Burroughs said principal members were concerned about the rapid turnaround and real cuts to their school budgets.

"There's a strong degree of concern that the budgets will still be cut for those schools that have been notified that they will they will be receiving cuts," Ms Burroughs said.

"The process for getting upward adjustments is complicated, not overly transparent. I guess we don't know the answer until Monday. But ... there's an extremely healthy degree of scepticism about this process from our principal members who feel as if they are just being asked to do the impossible in untenable timeframes."

A Legislative Assembly inquiry heard Education Directorate officials were preparing to work across the weekend to finalise funding decisions.

Acting chief operating officer Christine Wheeler said it was a genuine consultation process and the directorate wanted to give principals as much time as possible to complete the risk assessments.

"It's clear that when school leaders who are school site managers sign off on risk assessments, if there are risks there that they are uncomfortable with ... we've really made it clear that these are system risks and they are risks that we will support and manage at that system level and have that shared risk responsibility," Ms Wheeler said.

"That risk will feed into a panel assessment that we have. We will undertake those in a similar process to the exceptions process and ensure we have the appropriate level of mitigations."

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