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Key points

• Bill Shorten’s push for state governments to lift support for students with extra needs is set to kick off a fresh school funding stoush.
• It comes as the federal government prepares to release a year-long NDIS review. 
• The number of children participating in the NDIS is increasing at a higher-than-forecast rate. 
• Principals’ peak bodies say schools could host support centres where experts work on site as an alternative to the individualised supports of the NDIS. 
• But school leaders warn that teachers are not therapists, and any extra responsibility must be backed by extra resources. 

Bill Shorten’s push for state governments to lift support for students with extra needs will lay the ground for a fresh school funding stoush, with principals warning they will need more money to help children with autism on school grounds so that families aren’t forced to rely on the ballooning National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Shorten, the federal minister responsible for the $40 billion NDIS, this week said it could not be “a surrogate school system” as his government prepares to release a year-long review that will call on states to step up disability services for most Australians through their own systems or risk the scheme buckling under pressure.

Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and Minister for Government Services Bill Shorten.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Schools in particular will be a target of national cabinet discussions as a higher-than-forecast number of young children have joined with autism and developmental delay because they struggle to find support in the classroom or afford services on their own.

About 9 per cent of children aged five to seven are now participants – a figure that has grown every quarter and is a major reason the NDIS is one of the federal government’s biggest budget pains, set to cost $100 billion by 2032 without major changes.

Principals’ peak bodies say schools could host support centres where speech pathologists, occupational therapists and psychologists work on site as an alternative to the individualised supports of the NDIS – a view echoed by scheme architect Bruce Bonyhady who says children should receive help outside clinical settings.

But school leaders are also warning the government that teachers are not therapists and any extra responsibility they take on to divert students from the NDIS must be backed by extra resources, including funding, specialist staff and purpose-built facilities.

It comes as school funding negotiations are set to begin in full next year and public schools – which cater to the majority of disadvantaged children – will keep pushing for their full share of resourcing under the Gonski system. The negotiations will add pressure to funding rows already escalating between state and federal governments over infrastructure and migration.

The Australian Education Union’s president, Correna Haythorpe, said 87 per cent of principals her organisation surveyed said they didn’t have enough funding to meet the needs of students with a disability and were taking resources from other areas of their budgets to assist them instead.

“While Minister Shorten thinks schools should pick up the additional support for children with a disability, the reality is that public schools in Australia have been denied the resources they need to cater to them”, she said.

“Everyone that works in schools knows the reality of what it means when you don’t have resources to cater for increased complexity of children.”

Angela Falkenberg, president of the Primary Principals’ Association which represents all three school sectors, said schools were frequently accommodating back-to-back private NDIS appointments for students on school grounds, without having the administrative or physical resources to do so.

“This is the new world. We’re glad children have access to all these therapies, so they can be at their best. But how it came to be the remit of schools to manage this. It’s additional work that I think is unacknowledged and undervalued.”

She said the rise in diagnoses among school children, and resulting parent anxiety, was a common conversation among school leaders.

“We would happily be involved in conversations about how to make this work, but it must be resourced with additional staff and purpose-built spaces where therapists and children could interact very happily,” she said.

“I think that’s the confusion. We’re about access to the curriculum. We can do reading intervention, we can do art intervention. We can enact plans and ensure children co-operate in a classroom. But no one in a school has the expertise to be a physiotherapist or occupational therapist.”

Andy Mison, who heads the Australian Secondary Principals’ Association, said disability was a concern of school leaders across the country but “in particular in public schools, because the majority of kids with additional needs or disadvantage go to public schools”.

“We all share the aspiration that kids have the best opportunities. The issue is the resourcing and capacity to sustain that. Public schools in our country are underfunded and not resourced to provide an equitable education to all our kids, let alone be in a position to upscale our support for kids with additional needs,” he said.

He said disability loadings, which are already paid to schools, were not always enough to meet need.

“A school in the comfortable metropolitan areas might be able to put those loadings to good use because there is a higher likelihood of service and support. But how does that look in remote or regional, where you don’t have access to those services?”

NDIS data shows boys in regional and disadvantaged parts of the country have joined the scheme at up to three times the rate of their inner-city counterparts.

The increased complexity facing teachers in the classroom was also contributing to retention problems for an already struggling workforce, Mison said.

But Jordana Hunter, school education program director at the Grattan Institute, said schools’ struggles catering to students with disabilities was not just a funding issue.

“If it was just school funding, it would be a straightforward problem to solve. There are certainly disadvantaged schools that are using highly effective teaching approaches that are working well for students with autism or developmental delay. We need to get better at learning from these schools and spreading best practice,” she said.

Martin Laverty, who served on the NDIA board from 2013 to 2021, said state governments had cost-shifted to the federal government since promising to deliver disability support when the NDIS was implemented 10 years ago.

“States will have to play their role in early intervention as eligibility for the NDIS is worked through. The services exist, the challenge is how to deliver them,” he said.

“They will have to exist in different settings: at school and at home, rather than in a ‘disability scheme’. We want services to be integrated. There is re-engineering to be done in preschool and primary school, where the bulk of this happens.”

He said there was an opportunity to improve therapeutic services for children by delivering them in a familiar environment, in addition to bringing NDIS costs down. But he said there must be a phased transition that gave states time to work through the review and protected people with a disability.

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