Queensland's Department of Education is reviewing its regional loading formula — the top-up funding that schools in remote and outer-regional areas receive on top of base per-student allocations — and communities across Far North Queensland say they were given almost no warning. Letters went to school principals in late June, with a response deadline of July 18. For families already stretched thin, the timing landed like a cyclone notice with nowhere to shelter.
The review matters here more than almost anywhere else in the state. Cairns and its surrounding communities carry a student population with disproportionately high rates of socioeconomic disadvantage, English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EALD) enrolment, and First Nations students navigating both the state curriculum and the early stages of Queensland's treaty process. Strip back the loading, and the specialist staff it pays for disappear first.
What the loading actually buys
At Manunda Terrace State School on Pease Street, the regional loading funds two of the school's three EALD support teachers. The school draws heavily from Cairns' Pacific Island diaspora community — Samoan, Tongan, Fijian and Marshallese families who settled in the western suburbs — and EALD enrolments sit above 40 percent of the school's roughly 380 students. Parents who spoke to The Daily Cairns this week said those teachers are not a luxury item.
At Gordonvale State High School, about 25 kilometres south of the CBD on the Bruce Highway, the loading underpins the school's on-site youth health nurse and a part-time psychologist shared with two other schools. The school serves a significant number of students from sugarcane farming families as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students connected to communities along the Mulgrave River corridor. The nurse, parents said, is often the first adult a teenager discloses a problem to.
James Cook University's Bebegu Yumba campus on McGregor Road, which runs teacher education programs specifically designed to pipeline First Nations graduates back into regional classrooms, flagged the formula review in a letter to the Queensland Teachers' Union on June 30. A JCU spokesperson confirmed the university had written to the department expressing concern that any reduction in loading would reduce the number of funded classroom aide positions — the very roles that JCU graduates disproportionately enter during their provisional years.
Numbers that don't lie
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority's 2025 data shows that Far North Queensland students in Years 3 and 5 trail the national average in NAPLAN reading by an average of 18 scale score points — a gap that school principals here consistently attribute not to teacher quality but to the wraparound support infrastructure that regional loading pays for. Queensland's loading rate for outer-regional schools currently adds approximately $1,850 per student annually above the base Schooling Resource Standard amount. Even a ten percent reduction would translate to roughly $700,000 less flowing into Cairns-region schools each year, based on combined enrolment figures across the 11 schools the department classifies as outer-regional within the Cairns Local Government Area.
The Cairns Indigenous Women's Centre on Sheridan Street has been collecting written statements from families since the review was announced and plans to deliver them to the local state member's office before the July 18 deadline. A spokesperson for the centre said more than 60 families had submitted statements in the first five days alone.
The state government has not confirmed what, if any, changes will flow from the review. The Department of Education told The Daily Cairns the process was a routine funding equity assessment and that community feedback would be considered before any decisions were made. That answer did not satisfy anyone interviewed for this story.
Parents who want to submit feedback can do so directly through the department's Have Your Say portal before July 18, or through their school's P&C association. The Cairns Regional Council of P&Cs is holding an emergency meeting at the Cairns State High School hall on Sheridan Street on July 9 at 6:30pm, open to all families.
