As ACT Education Minister Joy Burch came under fire on Wednesday for her handling of a trial of a nurse telephone hotline across Canberra schools, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation said it had sent the strongest possible warning to Health officials that nurses could not delegate healthcare directions to teachers and teaching assistants under the trial.

ACT branch secretary Jenny Miragaya said the bureaucratic handling of the Healthcare Access in Schools pilot had been "a shambles" and "a long and sorry tale" between both the Health and Education directorates. The federation believed the trial should never have been extended to two of four special schools which cater to more than 400 of Canberra's most vulnerable and high-need students.

"We absolutely told ACT Health in no uncertain terms that you cannot have a delegated model of care with registered nurses delegating to unregulated and untrained staff – that is not to denigrate teachers or assistants."

Deputy director general of Canberra Hospital and Health Services Ian Thompson said the Health Directorate was working as quickly as possible to recruit two nurses to one special school with other nursing services re-established at the second.

This means five nurses will cover The Woden School, Black Mountain, Cranleigh and Malkara – as was the case prior to the trial starting this year.

Mr Thompson said he had been very concerned by the feedback he had received over the trial and would "take stock and review it".

But he could give no guarantee that nursing arrangements at Canberra special schools would not be changed in the future.

"We are considering all options, and will further consult."

He denied the trial was aimed at cutting costs and said it was to provide more individualised services for Canberra students.

Ms Miragaya said nurses had never been consulted on the guidelines for the trial and were told it would not be rolled out at the start of this year – instead they were informed transition arrangements would be put in place at the end of this year with full transition understood to be due by February 2016.

In a strongly worded letter to Mr Thompson in January she said: "It is apparent that our members are working within a piece-meal and contingency management approach to the care of students with complex needs which is completely unsatisfactory for the staff involved and may lead to poor outcomes for the students."

Again in April, Ms Miragaya wrote to Health saying "The ANMF asserts that nurses cannot delegate complex care to non-nurses (teachers and learning assistants) because it is inconsistent with nurses' delegation and supervision obligations."

These obligations raised questions over the legality of the trial in which nurses were expected to provide a phone triage system based on health assessments taken from unlicensed individuals.

Meanwhile, the Australian Education Union said its members had experienced acute stress and anxiety during the first term when nurses were removed from special schools and teachers and teaching assistants were expected to undertake high level medical care of students, including peg feeding and medication, diabetes management and injections and seizure management.

The Health Directorate confirmed on Friday that the nurses would be reinstated from the first day of second term starting in a fortnight.

But Ms Miragaya said the nurses who had been at the schools had been redeployed and Health would now need to recruit new staff to fill those positions.

"Whether they can meet a timeline to have these new staff ready to go for the start of the term remains to be seen," she said.

Opposition Education spokesman Steve Doszpot said Ms Burch's role in the trial needed to be examined closely.

"Ultimately some very vulnerable students have been put at risk under her watch and I really question her judgment. This sort of detail falling between the cracks of two portfolios shows a lack of leadership," Mr Doszpot said.

He has called on the ACT government to commit to permanently quarantining any special schools from inclusion in the trial and the permanent reinstatement of all nurses.

Similarly, Mr Fowler said "given the bureaucratic nightmare this has created, not to mention the very real potential for harm to come to vulnerable children, we call on the government to guarantee all special schools will be quarantined from this trial".