Disability Funding Rort? Or the actual cost of providing appropriate school-based Supports?
- Kate Hoad
- 10 minutes ago
- 8 min read
If you've missed the headlines recently about NCCD-linked disability support funding needing to be repaid by schools across Australia, you'd not be alone - for the Disability community, there's been so much change over the past 2-3 months, heck, the past 3-4 years, it's hard to keep up!
TLDR: News Corp is reporting that more than 300 schools have already repaid/will be repaying around $12 million, that schools are cutting learning-support staff and programs, and that the Commonwealth expects to save $463 million through these measures. Hester Hornbrook Academy alone is facing a demand to repay $22.9 million, which it disputes, while more than 20 staff have reportedly already lost their jobs and its anticipated disability funding has fallen by more than $10 million.
And I am absolutely furious about this - not because schools are being asked to repay disability funding, because absolutely - if funding has genuinely been claimed fraudulently or without appropriate evidence - please investigate it. Fully. Accountability matters. I'm angry because what is unfolding here is much bigger than one school, one audit, or one argument about NCCD paperwork.
The timing of this should concern every parent, teacher, allied health professional and disability advocate in Australia - Because in 23 days — on 1 October 2026 — Thriving Kids begins rolling out.
We are being told that Australia is deliberately moving away from relying so heavily on individual NDIS packages for children with developmental delay and autism with low-to-moderate support needs.
Instead, governments tell us children will increasingly receive support in the environments “where children live, learn and play” — including early childhood settings and schools. They're spouting that States and territories will be responsible for delivering much of it: developmental checks, navigation, parenting programs, targeted allied health, low-cost assistive technology and capacity-building supports.
The whole promise of Thriving Kids is that mainstream systems will step up. Education, Health and the
States and territories will step up. They keep saying Schools will become better equipped to identify developmental difference, include disabled children, collaborate with allied health and provide support in naturalistic environments.
Yet this reporting, in practice, highlights that at exactly the same time, we are watching disability funding disappear from schools that are already providing those supports, and more cuts are expected to all in future years...
That is the part I cannot reconcile. You cannot tell families:
“Your child does not need an individualised NDIS package because support should occur naturally in the places they already live, learn and play…”
…and then remove the funding that allows the people in those places to actually support them.
This is not reform - It is cost-shifting with children standing in the gap.
The National Agreement on Foundational Supports itself says mainstream services, Foundational Supports and the NDIS are supposed to operate as a connected ecosystem, with governments responsible for identifying and mitigating gaps, cost-shifting and interface problems. Yet we appear to be constructing exactly the gap the Agreement says governments are meant to prevent.
And here in Queensland the timing is even more extraordinary. As recently as 18 August, Minister Mark Butler confirmed again that every jurisdiction except Queensland had finalised its Thriving Kids implementation plan. Queensland families are therefore being asked to trust a new state-led support architecture that, weeks before commencement, is still not even UNDER CONSTRUCTION, yet alone finalised — while the national school disability funding environment is simultaneously becoming markedly more restrictive?!? Make it make sense, please.
We also need to talk about what “extensive” disability actually looks like.
Hester Hornbrook Academy has attracted attention because more than 90% of its students were reportedly classified in the NCCD “extensive” adjustment category, compared with a national average of 2.8%. Yes, that sounds dramatic until you consider who attends the school. Hester Hornbrook is a special assistance school specifically educating young people who have disengaged from mainstream education.
Most young people reach alternative education precisely because ordinary educational environments (and usually multiple attempts) have already been unable to accommodate their disability, mental health, neurodevelopmental, behavioural, communication, learning or psychosocial needs. Comparing that very specific population with the general Australian school population and saying, essentially, “Only 2.8% of children nationally require extensive adjustment, therefore 90% here cannot possibly require it” is an extraordinarily poor way to determine individual functional need. It may tell us to examine the evidence carefully, yes, but it does not, by itself, tell us the children did not need the support.
The 2026 NCCD Guidelines now make explicit that “extensive” adjustments involve sustained intensive support “at all times”. They also tighten guidance around imputing disability where attendance, family disruption, learning difficulties or other factors may be involved. That distinction matters enormously for children with invisible disability. Because disability does not always produce a neat, constant and observable need for adult assistance every minute of every school day. Furthermore - A child may participate successfully because intensive supports, relationships, environmental adjustments, predictability, co-regulation and flexibility are already in place.When we then remove those things and then measure the child again, and suddenly the “need” everyone was questioning becomes painfully visible. And everyone suffers in the meantime.
What happens when the funding disappears?
For schools, it means fewer education support staff, fewer youth workers, reduced programs, larger ratios and less flexibility. Technically, NCCD loading is not an individualised package tied to a particular child and therefore schools have flexibility in how the funding is allocated. At the extensive level, the 2026 Commonwealth funding calculation is around $45,000 per student, and schools use their overall resources to employ the humans and build the structures that make reasonable adjustment possible.
Take millions of dollars out of a school and eventually you take people out of classrooms.
For teachers, it means being told to differentiate more, regulate more, document more, individualise more, manage more complexity and somehow maintain inclusion — while removing the 'extra' adults whose positions make that possible. Lets be very realistic - A teacher cannot simultaneously teach 25 students, provide continuous co-regulation to a distressed child, supervise a child at risk of absconding, scaffold executive functioning, modify every learning task, support communication, manage sensory needs and maintain the learning of everyone else. All badged as 'inclusion'... That is setting teachers and children up to fail.
For families in the disability space, we know what comes next.
The phone calls - “Can you come and collect them?”
The shortened days, reduced timetables, meetings, suspensions.
The parent who has no choice but to stop working because school is no longer reliably available.
The family paying privately for support because the public systems have run out.
And eventually: “Maybe this school just isn't the right fit.” Which is often the polite language used when a disabled child has been functionally excluded from education.
None of this is hypothetical. I've seen it over and over, even whilst we've had NDIS support. Even whilst we've had NCCD funding... It's just about to get a whole lot worse. The Disability Royal Commission heard extensive evidence about students with disability experiencing inadequate adjustments, inappropriate suspensions and exclusions, reduced participation and poor educational experiences with consequences extending into mental health and employment. And this is where we need to stop pretending school disability funding is simply an education expense. Education ishould be considered early intervention because it direct impacts literacy, qualifications, independence, relationships, mental health, employment, economic participation and the capacity to live an ordinary adult life. It's not hard to see these are LIFE outcomes, surely?
When we remove support from a six-year-old, a twelve-year-old or a seventeen-year-old, we cannot calculate the “saving” simply from next year's education budget. Somebody pays. Sometimes immediately, sometimes much later. Who pays:
Families.
Teachers.
Health systems.
Mental-health systems.
Child-protection systems.
Income-support systems.
The employment system.
The economy?
And most importantly, the young person pays. Again - Please make it make sense?
There is another uncomfortable contradiction here. Another huge pushing point of the Government for Thriving Kids is that one-to-one therapy in isolated clinical rooms is not always best practice; that intervention should be contextualised, collaborative and embedded into everyday environments. I do agree. As an Occupational Therapist of 20 years, and having run my business now for 10 years, I have spent years advocating for exactly that. I built a functioning ecosystem working closely with a number of schools and their learning support teams:
Work with the teacher.
Observe the classroom.
Understand why lunchtime is falling apart.
Modify the actual task.
Change the environment.
Build the adults' capacity.
Support the child where participation is actually occurring.
But in the past 5 years, Principals have removed access to regular visiting allied health teams, who could assist to problem solve in-the-moment, with realistic and contextualised suggestions. Schools either locked them out with policy, or more recently with exorbinant room-hire fees per hour and strict non-contact with staff who supported these children day-in-day out. For our team and our families, that meant there went the lunchtime observations and directed problem-solving with staff. There went the 'quick question' opportunities passing in the corridor. And with them, there went many of the wonderful folk we were working closely with in learning support teams who left their jobs due to the increasing pressure, lack of support, and in many instances, pay on the same scale as a classroom teacher. Thriving Kids itself embraces that philosophy and proposes targeted allied health supports delivered through a mixture of group and individual approaches, including in homes, early childhood settings and schools. But can we get crystal clear here - naturalistic intervention requires a functioning natural environment.
An OT cannot capacity-build a teacher who has 27 children, no teacher aide, five children requiring significant adjustment and no release time.
A school cannot provide individualised regulation support without adults.
A child cannot be “included” through policy language alone.
Reasonable adjustment obligations do not disappear simply because the funding used to provide them has been reduced. Australian schools remain legally required to provide reasonable adjustments so students with disability can access and participate in education on the same basis as their peers.
So yes. Please. Audit NCCD. Require evidence. Investigate fraud. Improve consistency. Make schools accountable for billions of dollars of public money. But do not dress up a $463 million reduction in disability expenditure as administrative tidying and then act surprised when education support workers (Teacher Aides, LSOs, whatever they're called in your state) disappear, alternative school programs close, teachers become overwhelmed and leave the profession, disabled children start disappearing from classrooms and parents leave the workforce.
Preferably - before hundreds of millions of dollars are stripped from school disability supports - governments need to be held accountable to demonstrate precisely how the resulting support needs will be met. Not through another webpage. Not another inforgraphic. Not another speech at the press club. Not through another parent information session. Not through “capacity building” that actually means asking already-overloaded teachers and parents to do more. And certainly not through a future service system that has not yet demonstrated the capacity to replace what is being removed.
I've said it what feels like a million times over the past year in particular it seems - But evidently it needs further repetition - Because there is a very simple principle governments seem determined to keep forgetting:
The need does not disappear because the funding does.
You cannot remove individualised disability supports from one system, reduce intensive disability supports in another, and then point at the space between them and call it “mainstream inclusion”. And you certainly cannot build a program ironically called Thriving Kids while simultaneously dismantling some of the very supports that allow disabled children to attend school, participate, belong, learn — and ultimately have the opportunity to thrive.
This is about much more than NCCD.
This is about what kind of future we are prepared to fund for disabled children.
REFERENCES:
Thriving Kids Final Report: https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2026-05/thriving-kids-advisory-group-final-report_0.pdf
NDIS Amendment Bill 2026 Explanatory Memorandum:
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