Submission No 133

INQUIRY INTO FOUNDATIONAL AND DISABILITY SUPPORTS AVAILABLE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE IN NEW SOUTH WALES

Organisation: Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese Date Received: 18 September 2026

JOINT SUBMISSION TO THE PARLIAMENTARY SELECT COMMITTEE ON

FOUNDATIONAL AND DISABILITY SUPPORTS AVAILABLE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE IN NEW SOUTH WALES

About Our Organisations

This submission is collaborative work based on the experiences of three agencies of the Catholic Diocese of Parramatta that are directly involved in the provision of quality Catholic education, Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), and childcare and early learning across Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains. The agencies are Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese (CSPD), Ambrose Early Years Education and School Age Care, and Catholic Care Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains. Along with a case study from CSPD, which addresses the interconnected issues we discuss, these experiences are further supported by evidence from extant research, providing a Western Sydney perspective on these issues.

CSPD is a system of 80 Catholic schools – 58 primary and 22 secondary (including three Kindergarten to Year 12 schools), and two Catholic trade training campuses and three high-support learning settings. With a total student population of over 46,500 students and more than 6,500 teachers and staff, our vision is to enrich the lives of our students through education grounded in excellence, inclusivity and Catholic tradition.

Ambrose provides high-quality, faith-based learning and care for children, including pre-school for children aged 3–5 years, Out of School Care for children in Kindergarten to Year 6, and Vacation Care for children in Kindergarten to Year 6. As a not-for-profit social enterprise supporting families of all backgrounds, we have over 55 services providing safe, inclusive environments where children feel a strong sense of belonging, guided by Catholic faith and our values of Respect, Encouragement and Care.

Catholic Care is the official social welfare agency of the Parramatta Diocese. We provide free, low-cost and government-subsidised support services to vulnerable and disadvantaged community members. We support children of vulnerable families with a range of free and affordable childcare services. Our programs include Western Sydney Family Day Care, a crèche centre for parents and caregivers attending Mamre House in Orchard Hills, and a supported playgroup.

Executive Summary

Children and young people with developmental delay, disability or emerging support needs rely substantially on ECEC, schools and Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) as critical environments for early identification, support and inclusion. Educators in these settings are often the first to observe developmental differences, yet they face significant structural, workforce and system coordination barriers that limit their ability to respond effectively. Families encounter long waits for assessment, high costs, fragmented systems and inconsistent collaboration between services while educators carry substantial responsibility without adequate resourcing, specialist support or fair remuneration.

This submission outlines five interconnected issues:

The essential role of early identification in ECEC and school settings, and the operational, relational and resourcing challenges educators face.

The barriers families encounter accessing early childhood intervention and diagnostic services, including long waits, cost, inequity and system fragmentation.
The gaps in cross-sector collaboration and the opportunities for more integrated, culturally safe and place-based approaches.
Workforce capability pressures across ECEC and OSHC, including shortages, burnout, limited specialist training and remuneration disparities.
The increasing devolution of disability and clinical supports to education providers without corresponding funding, infrastructure or system alignment.

These issues highlight the urgent need for foundational and disability supports that are coordinated, accessible, culturally safe, well-funded and designed to reduce the burden on families and educators across New South Wales. Strengthening capacities for early identification, improving access to intervention, building workforce capability, enhancing cross-sector collaboration and addressing misaligned disability supports within education systems are crucial to improving outcomes for children and young people.

Key Recommendations

Recognise early identification in ECEC and schools as a critical prevention mechanism and fund foundational supports accordingly.
Reduce wait times and improve affordability and accessibility of diagnostic and early-intervention services.
Establish better coordinated, streamlined and shared information pathways across education, disability and child-protection systems.
Strengthen cross-sector partnerships to improve support continuity across education and care, including with Catholic education and community services sectors.
Invest in workforce capability, remuneration, specialist training and retention strategies across ECEC and OSHC.
Match disability support responsibilities with appropriate funding, reduce administrative burden and ensure schools are not absorbing clinical responsibilities without resourcing.
Ensure foundational support initiatives such as Thriving Kids are adequately resourced across mainstream education systems.

Issues in Foundational and Disability Supports for Children and Young People

1. Early Identification and Developmental Support in ECEC and School Settings

Educators as early identifiers of developmental need

Developmental monitoring is a core function of early learning and school-age care. Educators see children for extended periods and observe them alongside peers, making differences in communication, social interaction, emotional regulation, behaviour and participation more apparent.

Children may function differently in group environments than at home, where routines, transitions, shared attention and sensory demands are less pronounced. These everyday observations often form the earliest indicators that a child may need additional support. Early identification is essential, yet educators’ ability to respond is constrained by workforce capacity, family readiness and limited access to external supports.

The challenge of raising concerns with families

One of the most difficult operational issues is raising developmental concerns with families. Some parents are receptive and actively seek assistance. Others may not be ready to acknowledge concerns, may disagree with educators’ observations or may be reluctant to pursue assessment or intervention. This challenge is sufficiently common that the Australian Government has developed specific resources to help ECEC educators have these conversations with families.

What can appear as denial often reflects fear, stigma, uncertainty or concern that a child will be labelled or excluded. Recent Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) guidance recognises that families may be fearful of sharing concerns because they worry their child will not fit in or may be asked to leave.¹

There can be a considerable period between an educator first identifying a concern and a family being ready or able to act. During this time, the service continues to support the child regardless of whether a diagnosis, assessment or external support is in place.

Where parents do not consent to referral or engagement with external services, there are limits to what the ECEC service or schools can do. Educators can continue observing, documenting, adapting the environment, providing adjustments and working with the family, but they cannot independently pursue diagnosis or intervention on behalf of the child. This leaves educators managing emerging needs within existing staffing structures, often requiring substantially more individual attention, assistance with transitions and regulation, modification of activities, behaviour support and increased communication with families.

Strain on educators and continuity challenges

The impact of unmet needs is felt across the whole room or service. When one child requires sustained individual educator attention, another educator effectively has responsibility for a larger proportion of the group. This affects supervision, programming and the amount of individual attention available to other children. It can also influence enrolments and overall service capacity.

Educators often become the link between multiple parties, including families, inclusion agencies, schools, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, psychologists and other professionals while implementing different recommendations in the child’s everyday environment. In this context, continuity of educators matters, as developmental concerns are often identified through patterns observed over time.

Unmet needs and child protection risk

Unaddressed developmental and disability-related needs add to parenting stress and can contribute to escalation towards child protection involvement. Early identification

¹ Jane Warren, “Building Trust with Families: Relationships Supporting Children and Young People with Diverse Learning Needs,” ACECQA, 2026, https://www.acecqa.gov.au/latest-news/blog/building-trust-families-relationships-supporting-children-and-young-people-diverse-learning-needs.

and support in ECEC and school settings should therefore be recognised as a prevention mechanism, not solely an education issue.

Children known to child protection and family preservation programs generally show disproportionately high rates of undiagnosed developmental delay or disability. Instability disrupts the continuity of care needed to identify and act on concerns early, meaning the children most likely to benefit from early support are often least likely to be identified.

Coordination gaps across systems

Families engaging with child protection, education and disability services often do so with little coordination between systems. Stronger information-sharing, synergy and joint planning mechanisms, particularly for children already known to child protection, would ease the burden on families and improve consistency of support.

2. Barriers to Accessing Early Childhood Intervention and Diagnostic Services

Lengthy waits for assessment and intervention

The first six years of life are critical for brain development, and early intervention during this window can significantly improve outcomes. Yet families face lengthy waits for paediatricians, allied health professionals and diagnostic assessments. Waiting times for child developmental assessments in parts of Western Sydney can be up to 25 months, with research reporting median waits of 9.9 months and 11 months.2 Ultimately, even when concerns are recognised early and educators and parents agree that support is needed, the pathway to assessment and intervention is often slow or inaccessible.

These delays have practical consequences as they compound the impact of early developmental concerns and increase pressure on ECEC and school settings. While waiting, children may continue to experience difficulties with communication, emotional regulation, behaviour, social relationships and participation.

Cost barriers and inequitable access

Cost can also be a significant barrier. Families often face a choice between lengthy waits for publicly available services or paying privately for assessment and therapy, which is not affordable for many. As Western Sydney has lower average household income and greater socioeconomic disadvantage than the rest of Sydney, though the extent of

2 Yvonne Teoh, Pankaj Garg, Nugroho Karyadiguna, Sinthu Vivekanandarajah, Lydia So, Romy Hurwitz, and Shanti Raman (2025), “Caregiver experiences of accessing a child developmental assessment service in a culturally diverse population in Australia: A mixed methods study,” BMJ Paediatrics Open 9:e003003. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjpo-2024-003003; Sibella E. Bentley, Pankaj Garg, Ori Gudes, Romy Hurwitz, Sinthu Vivekanandarajah, and Lydia Y. L. So (2024), “Access to child developmental assessment services in culturally and linguistically diverse metropolitan Sydney: A retrospective cohort analysis,” BMC Health Services Research 24:342. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-024-10800-y

disadvantage varies considerably between local areas,³ cost barriers are very real for many families in the region. In addition to affordability, availability, transport and workforce shortages create further barriers to accessing assessment and support.

Navigating the system can be difficult. Parents may be required to coordinate appointments, referrals, assessments and different providers while also managing work and family responsibilities. For families living in Western Sydney’s dormitory suburbs, long‑haul commuting to access allied health services such as speech pathology is especially burdensome. Meanwhile, ECEC services carry much of the impact during the waiting period, supporting children with unmet or emerging needs often without additional staffing, specialist advice or funding.

Fragmentation and repeated storytelling

Another challenge concerns the fragmentation of the system. With few shared information-sharing pathways between schools, ECEC, family support and child protection services, parents must repeat sensitive information about their child’s needs, their family situation and often trauma or safety concerns to each new service. This is exhausting and can lead families to disengage altogether.

Families falling between systems

A family can be too complex for the usual pathway and still get no support. For example, a family known to child protection may not meet the threshold for additional inclusion support at school, while a child flagged by educators as needing developmental support may be entirely unknown to family services. Families thus fall into gaps between systems rather than being caught by either.

Trust barriers for child protection-involved families

Families with child protection involvement may avoid engaging with any new service, including inclusion or disability supports, out of fear it will be seen as evidence against them. In this sense, apart from the aforementioned disruption linked to family instability, the families most in need of coordinated support are often the most reluctant to seek it.

3. Cross-Sector Collaboration: What Works and What Is Missing

Limitations of the inclusion support program

The Inclusion Support Program (ISP) provides important support, but it can be complex and time‑consuming for services to access. Services must work with an Inclusion Agency, develop a Strategic Inclusion Plan and, where funding is required, apply through the Inclusion Development Fund. ISP funding does not generally provide one-to-one support

³ Andy Marks, Rhonda Itaoui, and Tegan Bergan, Untapped Talent: Western Sydney’s Remarkable but Inequitable Labour Market (Sydney: Centre for Western Sydney, Western Sydney University, 2022), https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/content/dam/digital/images/centre-for-western-sydney/CfWS- Untapped-Talent-Oct-22-FINAL.pdf; Khandakar Al Farid Uddin and Awais Piracha (2025), “Unequal COVID‑19 socioeconomic impacts and the path to a sustainable city and resilient community: a qualitative study in Sydney, Australia,” Cogent Social Sciences 11(1): 2474184, DOI: 10.1080/23311886.2025.2474184.

for an individual child; instead, it increases overall educator-to-child ratios. In practice, there can still be a significant gap between the level of support a child requires and the staffing capacity available.

The process requires considerable input from service leaders and educators, including identifying and documenting barriers, liaising with families and specialists, developing inclusion strategies, preparing applications, and implementing and reviewing strategies.

OSHC inclusion and collaboration challenges

OSHC presents unique inclusion challenges. Children arrive after a full school day, often tired, and move into a less structured, recreational environment with mixed-age groups, frequent transitions, indoor and outdoor movement, and greater choice. Support needs can present differently in OSHC than in a structured classroom environment.

Collaboration between ECEC, schools, OSHC, allied health, child protection and family services is inconsistent and often inadequate. Some services have strong working relationships with their school, with regular communication about children requiring additional support and the strategies that work for them. In other settings, communication is limited and OSHC educators may have little visibility of the adjustments, behaviour strategies or specialist supports in place during school hours. This results in a lack of continuity of support for the child and places additional burden on families and educators.

Connected approaches and place-based models

There is an opportunity for a more connected approach, where families, schools, ECEC and OSHC services, Inclusion Agencies and allied health professionals share practical strategies and provide more consistent support across the environments a child attends.

Family preservation and early support caseworkers are often already inside the home, working with families that schools and ECEC services find hardest to reach. This trust and access are an underused collaboration asset. Partnerships between educators and family support services would allow engagement through a relationship that already exists, rather than starting cold.

Place-based models should bring family services into the team around the child alongside allied health and Inclusion Agencies, not after them. This allows developmental support and family stabilisation to run in parallel rather than sequentially.

Encouraging collaboration with ACCOs

Collaborating with child-focused Aboriginal Community-Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) ensures interventions are culturally safe, responsive and appropriate. ACCOs strengthen families, keep children safe and reassure parents. The Connected Beginnings program exemplifies this place-based, collaborative approach, where local ACCOs work with early childhood education, health and family support services to provide culturally safe services supporting children and families.4

4 SNAICC, “Connected Beginnings,” SNAICC – National Voice for Our Children, accessed 2 September 2026, https://www.snaicc.org.au/our-work/early-childhood-development/connected-beginnings/.

4. Workforce Capability and Pressure in Early Years and School Age Care

Increasing complexity of needs

Educators are increasingly supporting children with complex developmental, behavioural and disability‑related needs. This requires skills, experience and confidence that extend beyond educators’ initial qualifications and training, yet access to specialised training and advice is inconsistent.

Limited specialist training undermines the ECEC sector’s ability to support children with complex needs. These pressures reduce the capacity of educators to respond effectively to early developmental concerns and to implement consistent strategies.

Need for specialist advice and capability building

Educators need practical, child‑specific strategies and access to specialist expertise, rather than simply being expected to develop increasingly specialised disability capability themselves. Any expansion of foundational supports through ECEC and OSHC needs to recognise existing workforce capacity, as these supports place additional demands on educators.

Workforce instability, burnout and remuneration gaps

Increasing the complexity and responsibility of educator roles without addressing remuneration, staffing and burnout risks placing further pressure on an already stretched workforce. In a sector already experiencing significant workforce shortages and instability, high workloads, administrative requirements and the emotional demands of supporting children with significant unmet needs contribute to fatigue and educators leaving the sector.

There is also a significant remuneration gap between ECEC educators and schoolteachers. A recent Victoria University Mitchell Institute study reported a median hourly wage of approximately $34.30 for early childhood educators and child carers compared with $62.00 for schoolteachers.5 This disparity makes attracting and retaining experienced staff particularly challenging.

OSHC workforce challenges

OSHC faces additional workforce issues. The workforce is often casual or part‑time and can include younger and less experienced educators, yet they may be supporting the same children who receive significant adjustments and specialist support during the school day. Without proper professionalisation, consistent quality of support cannot be assured.

Impact of turnover on children with additional needs

Workforce turnover in the ECEC sector directly affects children with additional needs. These children often benefit most from familiar educators, predictable relationships and

5 Peter Hurley, Sarah Pilcher, and Melissa Tham, The Price of a Place: Instability, Risk and the Hidden Cost of Australia’s Early Childhood Education and Care System (Melbourne: Mitchell Institute, Victoria University, 2026), https://mitchell-institute.vu.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/the-price-of-a-place-report-2026.pdf.

consistent strategies. High staff turnover disrupts this continuity and affects the relationships and trust established with families.

Pressure on educator teams

Supporting children with significant unmet needs can place considerable pressure on the whole educator team. Where additional support is unavailable, one educator may spend substantial time supporting a child’s regulation, behaviour, transitions or participation, leaving fewer staff available to support the broader group. This also places an emotional load on educators supporting children with complex, unmet needs.

5. Devolution of Interventions and Supports to Education Providers

Shift of NDIS supports to schools

Schools are increasingly serving as the primary site for clinical and disability supports, often without the system‑wide infrastructure, staff expertise or resourcing needed to sustain these roles. The introduction of Thriving Kids, which uses mainstream systems including schools as delivery sites for students with mild to moderate needs transitioning off the NDIS, will significantly increase demand on schools.

As responsibilities previously funded through the NDIS shift to education providers without corresponding funding or clinical expertise, schools face critical concerns regarding funding alignment and resource gaps within education budgets. The implications for the availability and quality of support are serious and cannot be ignored.

Silent cost shifting to education providers

Education providers absorb the costs of devolved support. The collaborative processes required to determine, implement and monitor adjustments place additional demands on staff, and educators are expected to develop specialised disability‑related capabilities that extend far beyond their initial training, often without consistent specialist advice or increased remuneration.

Schools also carry the cost of delivering reasonable adjustments to maintain student engagement, even when the support is clinical in nature and should be funded through the NDIS. As education providers struggle to meet these demands, the quality of supports available to children and young people may be adversely affected at the very time they need the highest level of assistance.

Funding shortfalls and administrative burden

While the NCCD is intended to inform resourcing, the administrative burden of documenting and evidencing adjustments is immense, often compromising a teacher’s ability to plan and implement those very adjustments. Teachers are finding it increasingly difficult to evidence the support required for a growing number of students with high needs due to resourcing limitations and the time‑intensive nature of NCCD documentation. There is a significant gap between required documentation, support and available staffing, particularly as funding rarely covers the small‑group or one‑to‑one assistance many students require.

External expectations and misalignment with school capacity

Expectations are frequently set externally by allied health and medical professionals who recommend specific school‑based resources, such as full‑time teaching assistants, as

conditions for student success. These external recommendations often create tension during enrolment, as they may not reflect a school’s actual staffing capacity or the educational necessity of the support.

Schools are increasingly expected to bridge the gap between parents, external agencies and medical specialists while implementing diverse adjustments. There is often misunderstanding from external providers and parents regarding the appropriateness and capacity to deliver support in a one‑to‑one therapy session versus a group learning environment.

Unintended consequences

The lack of direct access to therapy and clinical support for some students can limit educational gains and negatively impact student wellbeing, despite the best efforts of school teams. This leads to staff fatigue and frustration that current approaches may not address the student’s holistic needs.

When a child requires sustained individual attention due to unmet clinical needs, the responsibility of other educators for the group is increased, which may impact supervision, programming and the overall quality of attention and instruction for all students. Inconsistent follow‑through of recommendations across home and school settings also hinders improved student outcomes and challenges the stability of long‑term plans for students with complex needs.

Case Study: Holistic and Wrap-Around School Support for Students with Disability

A CSPD primary school enrolled two brothers a year apart into Kindergarten, both younger siblings of current students. Neither child possessed a formal diagnosis, nor had they accessed early intervention services or NDIS funding prior to school entry. During their orientation and transition to school, the school team identified significant complex needs across communication, cognition, learning engagement, attention span and self-regulation for both children.

Reports from preschool educators indicated that recommendations to seek external medical evaluations had not been pursued. The mother, who lives with a diagnosed intellectual developmental disorder, faced substantial barriers in recognising the extent of her sons’ developmental needs and navigating the complex NDIS application process.

Educational and diagnostic support

In response, the school implemented extensive adjustments and after consultation and collaboration with both parents, systematically gathered evidence to impute disability under the cognitive and social/emotional categories. Subsequent formal diagnostic assessments by the CSPD Assessment Team resulted in dual diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder (Level 3) and Moderate Intellectual Developmental Disorder for both brothers.

Comprehensive welfare and family support

Recognising that learning outcomes depended on overall family well-being, the school expanded its role far beyond traditional educational remits. To ensure basic needs were met, the school directly provided ongoing material aid, including food, uniforms, school bags and learning equipment to all four siblings. Concurrently, the school initiated

contact and liaised with external case workers from a not-for-profit community services provider to establish broader social support systems.

Bridging the external care gap

The school proactively facilitated the family’s engagement with NDIS, stepping in to deliver intensive internal interventions and therapies during an extended period when external Allied Health support was absent. Even following the approval of NDIS packages, the school continued to assist the parents in managing system complexities and organising suitable therapeutic care.

Recognising the requirement for specialised long-term environments, both students were identified as high-priority placement at a CSPD High Support Learning Centre. Prior to finalising this placement, the family transitioned the children to support classes within a local Department of Education school.

Key Areas of Focus

Based on firsthand experiences across our three agencies, including the above case study, and current research evidence, we recommend that the government give due consideration to the following areas in its reforms:

Strengthen early identification and developmental support across ECEC and school settings, recognising it as a prevention mechanism linked to child safety and wellbeing.
Improve availability of early intervention and diagnostic services by reducing wait times, addressing cost barriers and ensuring equitable access for Western Sydney families.
Establish coordinated, streamlined and shared information pathways across education, disability, child protection and family services to reduce fragmentation, bureaucratic silos and repeated storytelling.
Build stronger cross-sector collaboration and partnerships with family support services, allied health, Inclusion Agencies and ACCOs, and improve support continuity between early childhood, school and OSHC settings. This includes a consciousness of the contribution of not-for-profit sector providers including in Catholic education and community services organisations.
Invest in workforce capability, fair remuneration and retention of qualified educators across ECEC and OSHC, with access to specialist advice and practical, child-specific strategies.
Align disability support responsibilities with appropriate funding, reduce administrative burden and prevent silent cost shifting to education providers, including the growing clinical demands.
Ensure Thriving Kids and any similar initiatives expanding early intervention and foundational supports across ECEC, OSHC and schools are backed by dedicated, sustainable resourcing within education systems.

Conclusion

Foundational and disability supports for children and young people in NSW must be strengthened across early childhood, school and OSHC settings. Educators are central to early identification and everyday support, yet they face significant structural, workforce and system-coordination barriers. Families encounter long waits, high costs, fragmented

systems and inequitable access, while schools absorb responsibilities previously funded through the NDIS, with far-reaching consequences for the quality of available supports.

A coordinated, well-resourced and culturally safe system is essential. Strengthening early identification, improving access to intervention, enhancing collaboration and investing in workforce capability are critical. Funding for disability supports should be matched with delivery so children and young people receive the support they need to thrive across all environments, particularly those facing persistent structural or situational barriers.

Reforms must pay attention to these issues simultaneously as they feed into each other. They require coordinated design and coherent funding that prevents cost shifting to ECEC and education providers and supports a stable, sustainable system. They also need shared accountability and implementation that recognise the interdependence of early identification, family support, workforce capability and system coordination, especially where multiple services intersect around a child’s daily experiences.

While embedding developmental and disability supports within early childhood education and schools is a worthwhile step towards preventing segregated care, implementing the changes outlined above requires a system that delivers early supports, responds effectively and gives families and educators the stability needed to help children thrive from their earliest developmental years. They will also reduce the long‑term impacts of foundational and disability challenges, enabling children and young people to achieve their full potential.