The ACT government's highly anticipated return to school plan has been criticised by the education union, with concerns expressed that not all rapid antigen tests will be available by the first day of term.
Canberra students will return to school next week as planned with surveillance testing included but schools will not be entirely reliant on testing and it will not be compulsory.
There will be no remote teaching available and children will be marked absent if parents choose not to send them to school. However, remote learning is still an option if there is a critical shortage of teachers.
The ACT's plan will follow that of NSW and Victoria with two tests a week provided to every student and school staff member across the first four weeks of Term 1.
Education Minister Yvette Berry said the first lot of rapid antigen tests - about 206,000 - will be delivered to schools by the end of next week and individual schools will be responsible for distributing the tests to parents via contactless collection points.
But the Australian Education Union ACT Branch secretary Patrick Judge said the tests should have been available in time for the start of the year.
"With a health monitoring regime in place, school could have started with confidence that those who were attending on day one were COVID negative," Mr Judge said.
"Instead, we will be facing the potential chaos of a wave of infections right at the beginning of the school year."
While not all of the tests will be distributed in the first days of school, Ms Berry said there were other measures in place to keep students and staff safe.
She pointed to priority booster shots for teachers, which has been rolled out over the past weeks.
Ms Berry said teachers and students could access tests at testing centres next week.
"Rapid antigen tests are another tool in our toolkit if you like to make sure that we have as many measures in place to keep our schools safe, and to reduce the transmission of COVID in our schools," she said.
Issues with rapid antigen test supplies have plagued the territory over recent weeks but Chief Minister Andrew Barr said the territory had received extra stock in the past days.
Mr Barr said there were 160,000 tests delivered last Friday and there were 200,000 expected on Monday. He said by the end of the week an extra 300,000 tests were due to arrive. About 2.5 million are expected over February.
The rapid antigen tests won't be compulsory and the ACT government will rely on goodwill that parents won't send children to school if they are sick.
As tests are not compulsory, parents will not have to log negative results. If a child tests positive the result will need to be logged with ACT Health and will need to inform the school.
Ms Berry said schools would have a leading role in making their communities safe against widespread transmission but that authorities felt transmission was more likely to occur outside of school communities.
ACT Council of Parents and Citizens Association president Alison Elliott said the addition of rapid antigen tests would give an extra level of confidence to families.
However, she said parents were split on a return to face-to-face learning.
"It was never going to be possible to please everyone. We've heard from a lot of parents who wanted the return to face-to-face learning to be delayed until this peak has passed or primary schoolers can be fully vaccinated," Ms Elliott said.
"But parents have been very split. An equal number of parents wanted schools to be open from day one and were strongly opposed to home learning."
ACT Education Directorate deputy director-general Jane Simmons said there would be no remote teaching option available.
"If [parents] make a decision, a personal decision that they wanted to keep their child at home, they will be marked absent... they'll have access to the Google platforms to be able to do online learning, but they won't have teacher face-to-face learning because teachers will not be doing teaching at school on campus and teaching remotely," Ms Simmons said.
Teachers and students in year 7 and above will be required to wear masks and mask wearing will be strongly encouraged for students in years 3 to 6. Unlike NSW, cloth masks will be allowed in the ACT.
