National guidelines recommend one counsellor for every 500 students.

But in the ACT that figure is one counsellor for 750 students and the ACT government has held back from committing fully to the target despite saying it had agreed to all the recommendations in the independent review into students with complex needs and challenging behaviour handed down on Wednesday.

Part of the government's formal response to the review was to "agree in principle" to adopt the 1:500 ratio but that it had "recently increased the ratio of school psychologists to students to a level that compares favourably across all Australian schools [and] in 2016 will consider options for strengthening multi-disciplinary teams who complement the work of school psychologists".

That improved ratio will be 1:733 – still well above the recommended level.

When asked to explain when the 1:500 target would be met, the Education Directorate said "the planning on these initiatives is still being undertaken".

The Australian Education Union and the opposition said this was unacceptable.

AEU ACT branch secretary Glenn Fowler said "the government needs to stop dancing around the issue, and stop hiding behind its model of multi-disciplinary teams of allied professionals and others that visit school – it is not the same thing."

The union had campaigned hard to win an extra four psychologists in its enterprise bargaining negotiations but some schools had almost 1000 students and had access to a psychologist for only part of the week.

"This is unacceptable, and it is not only the AEU saying it and the NSW Coroner saying it, and psychologist associations saying it. Now Professor Shaddock and his eminent panel have recognised the need to fund and implement a ratio of 1:500 in schools," Mr Fowler said.

The Shaddock review – issued publicly on Wednesday – says the need to bolster trained counsellors on the front line of dealing with students with complex needs was urgent.

"Throughout the expert panel's consultation, the lack of capacity of school psychologists to meet student need was a consistent theme raised by many stakeholders in the public sector," the report says. .

It also found more than 30 per cent of school leaders nominated additional access to the school psychologist as one thing that would make a difference in supporting students with complex needs and challenging behaviour.

School psychologists themselves expressed extreme frustration to the expert panel, saying "they have the skills to help students but do not have the time to give them the amount of support they need".

Mr Fowler said the union supported multi-disciplinary teams in schools but he felt the government was being disingenuous in its response to the Shaddock review.

"Broadly we support that model and the great people who work within it, but it does not get the government off the hook on Tony Shaddock's recommendation."

"This is not an either/or. Let's have the multi-disciplinary teams, and let's have more school psychologists, which bring enormous clinical capacity to managing students with complex needs and challenging behaviours. The investment will pay dividends for the entire system."

Similarly, opposition education spokesman Steve Doszpot said the ACT had long been well below standards for counsellor numbers and he had little faith the situation would be turned around.

"We've heard so much from the minister, Joy Burch, in terms of additional commitments but she needs to deliver, particularly given there was a previous education review in 2009. When I visit schools across Canberra the issues surrounding the numbers of counsellors and psychologists are consistently raised with me."

"We're pleased that the government has committed to all of the recommendations of the Shaddock review but that's one thing; staff and students need actual support. I've been talking about this issue for years, it's time the government delivered."