Students in year 4, 5 and 6 at Macgregor Primary School will stay home for one week starting from Friday.

Principal Belinda Andrews told parents via email that preschool to year 3 students could continue to attend school, along with children of essential workers and vulnerable students.

"As with all parts of the ACT community, we have been challenged by the impact of COVID-19 on our school operations," she said.

"In recent weeks we have experienced limited teacher availability primarily due to staff isolating with COVID-19 or as household contacts.

"We have unfortunately reached a point where our school is unable to run our normal face to face learning programs for all year groups from tomorrow, Thursday 31 March."

Year 4, 5 and 6 students will learn via Google Classroom. The school anticipates face-to-face learning to resume on Friday, April 8.

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This is the first school in the ACT to turn to level three under the staffing shortage plan since the beginning of the year.

Level one shortages are dealt with using casual staff and existing staff members. Level two shortages have access to a centrally managed pool of casual staff.

Level three staff shortages invoke a temporary transition to remote learning covering part of the school.

Level four is the highest level and would send a whole school into remote learning with the approval of the director general of the Education Directorate.

Queanbeyan High School and Karabar High School briefly turned to remote learning earlier this month.

Parents of the upper primary students were given little notice of their children switching to remote learning, which could prompt them to return to working from home.

The Australian Education Union ACT branch previously warned that some school may have to close as some campuses had up to a quarter of staff sick or isolating because of COVID.

Union officials said many schools were at level two shortages.

The virus-related absences have exacerbated an underlying national shortage of teachers.

A taskforce on teacher shortages was formed, but has faced challenges due to a lack of data about workforce projections according to union officials.

The number of COVID-19 cases within ACT school communities remains high, with 1501 cases reported across 126 schools in the week ending in Sunday, March 27.

Meanwhile, the ACT reported 1139 new infections to 8pm on Tuesday with 328 of those people aged between 25 to 39. This takes the territory's pandemic case tally to 76,537. A total of 1063 new cases were reported the day before.

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