Support for specialist supports for children with complex needs (Provider advocacy)

Submission 829

Darling Point Special School P&C Association - Executive representatives

Submission - NDIS (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for

Future Generations) Bill 2026

Submitted by: Three members of the Executive Committee of the Darling Point Special School Parents and Citizens Association, which operates as a registered NDIS provider delivering allied health and therapy supports for children with disability.

Position: Support  for the  intent  of the  Bill, with amendments. We support the  Bill’s

sustainability and integrity objectives and ask that it be amended before passage to address the operational concerns set out below.

Basis: This submission is made by three members of the Executive Committee who are responsible for the operation of the Association’s registered NDIS services, and it speaks from

that operational experience.  It  is not made on behalf of the wider P&C membership.

Operational details are drawn from the Association’s records as at May 2026.

Request: We request that this submission be published with our names withheld. We are willing to be contacted by the Committee through the secretariat, using the details provided with this submission.

Date: June 2026

About this submission

This submission is made by three members of the Executive Committee of the Darling Point Special School Parents and Citizens Association (“the Association” or “the P&C”). The Association is a statutory body constituted under the Education (General Provisions) Act 2006 (Qld), and operates as a registered NDIS provider delivering allied health and therapy supports to students with disability at the school. We are the Executive members responsible for the operation of those registered services, and we make this submission in that capacity: it speaks to the business of delivering registered supports, and is not made on behalf of the wider Association membership. In running these services we engage and manage support workers, contract allied health providers, purchase therapy services, manage waitlists, and carry the compliance, audit and staffing obligations that come with operating registered NDIS services for children with high and complex support needs.

The children we support live with a wide range of physical, intellectual, cognitive and psychosocial disabilities, both seen and unseen, and many of them have very high and complex support needs. Through these services the Association currently supports around forty of the school’s roughly one hundred and eighty students - a community whose supports depend on these services continuing to operate safely and sustainably.

We make this submission in that operational capacity, and that capacity alone. We are not a peak body, and we do not presume to speak for participants, for families, for the wider Association membership, or for the disability or provider sectors generally. We speak only to what we see and do as a provider and operator: how the settings of the Scheme determine

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Submission 829

Darling Point Special School P&C Association - Executive representatives

whether supports can actually be staffed, delivered and sustained for the children in our care. Several provisions of this Bill will be felt first, and most directly, by services like ours.

We should also be plain about how the Association is resourced, because it bears on several points below. Our executive is a volunteer committee, and we have no dedicated paid administrative staff: the work of running registered services - claims, compliance, rostering and reporting - is carried out by office-holders in the hours they can find around their own jobs and families. We mention this not to seek sympathy, but because several of the Bill’s time bound obligations fall directly on that finite, volunteer administrative capacity.

We do not approach the NDIS believing it should be beyond scrutiny. As custodians of public funds we take our integrity and compliance obligations seriously: we operate against the NDIS Practice Standards, and we have invested in online incident reporting, audit tooling, system based therapy waitlists and compliance checklists. We accept that the Scheme has grown faster than was foreseen, that fraud and provider exploitation are real and harmful, and that government has a clear duty to keep the Scheme sustainable. We support reform of the NDIS, and we support the sustainability and integrity objectives of this Bill.

Our submission is therefore one of support with amendments. We confine our comments to the provisions that bear on how supports are actually delivered to children with complex needs, and on the viability and supply of the specialist, relationship-based services those children rely on. Our central concern is a practical one: that several measures which are individually defensible may, in combination, reduce the supply and viability of exactly those supports. We respectfully ask that the Bill be amended, before passage, to address the concerns set out below.

1. Common ground: we support the intent of reform It would be inconsistent for a service that handles public money to oppose measures designed to protect it. We support proportionate, risk-based provider registration, sound record-keeping,

   faster detection of improper claims, and the removal of conflicts of interest in plan

management. Fraud and exploitation harm the children and families who depend on the Scheme, and they erode the public confidence on which services like ours rely. On the available evidence that wrongdoing sits overwhelmingly on the provider side, and we accept that providers should be properly regulated and held to account.

Our concern in what follows is therefore not whether to pursue integrity and sustainability, but how to do so without unintentionally reducing the supply of specialist supports. As drafted, several measures are blunt enough to bear down on exactly the specialist, relationship-based services that children with complex needs depend on - the services a provider like us exists to deliver. We set out those concerns below, each tied to the provision that gives rise to it, and each followed by a practical amendment that we believe would address it while preserving the Bill’s objectives.

2. Provider registration scope and specialist supply (s 10C) Proposed s 10C re-defines “NDIS provider” and extends the registration and penalty regime to persons who provide supports or services to people with disability other than under the Scheme, where they are “prescribed by the” rules (s 10C(1)(b)). Tying the reach of mandatory registration to a category that the rules can later expand creates uncertainty for the providers we depend on, and for the way we hope to grow capacity.

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Submission 829

Darling Point Special School P&C Association - Executive representatives

To be accurate about our own position: our therapy and support staffing is currently delivered

through  third-party  businesses  rather  than  individual  sole  traders. Even  so,  those

arrangements are deeply relationship-based - continuity of the particular therapist or worker matters enormously to a child with complex needs, and is often the difference between a support that works and one that does not. Following an expression-of-interest process we recently contracted an occupational therapy provider to deliver around four therapy days a week, about twenty therapy slots, and we intend to repeat that model to grow capacity. We are also actively considering how best to engage practitioners in future, including the prospect of contracting independent and sole-trader clinicians and support workers directly; our engagement model is itself under review by the executive.

The concern for this Bill is therefore about the pool of specialist supply we draw on now and hope to broaden. The clinicians and workers most suited to children with complex sensory and behavioural needs are scarce, and the smaller and more specialist the operator, the more a registration and penalty regime calibrated for large organisations - and capable of being widened by rule - risks driving them out of the market altogether. If that pool contracts, so does the capacity we are able to offer our students.

Recommendation. Settle the scope of mandatory registration, and what it requires, in the Act with small and specialist providers expressly in mind; calibrate it to risk; and do not allow it to be expanded by rule without primary legislation.

3. The 90-day claims window (Schedule 2, Part 5) Reducing the claims window to 90 days is presented as an integrity measure. For a small provider delivering therapy and disability supports, it is a significant operational risk. Our invoicing necessarily runs partly in arrears - therapies are often paid for before parents are invoiced, and we bulk-invoice - a timing pattern we are actively working to improve, but one that is common across small disability and care services. A hard, short deadline does little to stop a determined fraudster, who simply claims promptly; its practical effect is to deny honest providers and self-managing families payment for support genuinely delivered, when limited back-office capacity lets the paperwork slip past day ninety.

   This point connects directly to how the Association is run. As noted above, claims

administration falls to a volunteer committee with no dedicated paid administrative support, working in time found around their own jobs and families - the same people who keep the supports of some forty children running. A short, fixed claiming deadline does not only risk the occasional payment - it competes directly with the finite volunteer hours on which the whole service depends. In a lean, volunteer-run service, a claiming window set too tightly does not so much improve integrity as compromise our capacity to deliver. The burden of these deadlines falls hardest on exactly the small and specialist operators in thin markets that children with complex needs rely on.

Recommendation. Reconsider or lengthen the claims window, and in any event build transitional relief and a clear exception pathway for small and volunteer-run providers and for self-managers, so that genuine claims for support actually delivered are not extinguished by an administrative deadline.

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Submission 829

Darling Point Special School P&C Association - Executive representatives

4. Price-setting and the cost of specialist delivery (s 45C) We support transparent price discipline in principle. Providers have long since adjusted to the Scheme’s annual price movements, and a clear mechanism for setting maximum prices is reasonable. Our concern is specific and operational: a maximum price set below the genuine cost of delivering specialist therapy to a child with complex behavioural and sensory needs makes that service unviable for us to provide.

The cost of safely delivering an hour of therapy to our cohort is materially higher than for a lower-complexity participant - it can require more preparation, environmental adjustment, and at times additional supervision. As a not-for-profit that reinvests therapy revenue into building capacity, our margins are thin; our year-to-date result this year was a small operating loss.

We want to be direct about the consequence, because it is not rhetorical. If maximum prices are set below what it costs us to deliver safely to this cohort, we will not be able to continue providing the service. A not-for-profit running a small operating margin cannot absorb a structural loss on every hour delivered; the service would not simply shrink, it would close. The result of a benchmark set below true cost in a specialist market is not a cheaper service

• it is no service, and forty children left to find support in a market that is already short of it. Recommendation. Retain the price-setting power, but ensure maximum prices reflect the genuine cost of specialist and complex-needs delivery - including appropriate complexity loadings - and consult specialist providers in setting them, rather than applying one-size caps that assume low-complexity delivery.

5. Funding banding and worker-to-participant ratio caps (Sch 4 s

32K(3B)-(3C); s 33(2EA))

This is, for us, the most critical part of the Bill, because it goes to the safety of the children we are responsible for. Our services exist for highly complex individuals with very high support needs, across a range of physical, intellectual, cognitive and psychosocial disabilities, both seen and unseen. Provisions that assume a typical or average participant do not describe the children in our care.

Schedule 4 allows the rules to specify “levels of need” and to attach funding amounts to them, and provides that a funding amount “may be more than, equal to or less than the actual cost of providing or acquiring the support” (s 32K(3C)). The children we serve sit at the high-needs extreme, where real delivery costs run well above any band set as typical. Where a banded amount does not meet that cost, the practical result for a provider is simple: the support cannot be delivered within the funding available.

More acute still is proposed s 33(2EA)(c), which permits a determination to cap the “maximum ratio of worker to participant”. Across the supports we deliver we staff to safety, not to a ratio. Some children in our care require one-to-one supervision - and some have previously required two-to-one - because they are flight risks, or because they may harm themselves or others when dysregulated in a group. A mandated group ratio is not a saving; it makes safe delivery impossible and transfers the risk onto the child, the worker and the service. Section 33(2EB) compounds the problem by requiring funding methods to honour the cap “regardless of whether a funding component amount meets the cost of the supports”.

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Submission 829

Darling Point Special School P&C Association - Executive representatives

Recommendation. Remove the power to cap the worker-to-participant ratio; ensure that no funding cap is set below the cost of the supports necessary for a participant’s safety; and retain genuine individual assessment above any banded baseline.

6. Workforce is the binding constraint on supply This is the single most important observation we can offer from operational experience, and it underpins much of what is above. The factor that most limits the supports we are able to

   provide is not participant demand, and it is not willingness to fund - it is the availability of

suitable staff. The Scheme’s settings should be designed with that reality in mind.

Some concrete examples from our own operations:

• Therapy capacity. We ran an expression-of-interest process and contracted an occupational therapy provider for around four therapy days a week (about twenty therapy slots), and we intend to repeat the model. At every stage the limiting step is finding qualified clinicians who are available to take the work - not finding children who need it.

• Recruitment. We run a structured recruitment campaign, including paid advertising, with hires made and further interviews underway, specifically to build our capacity to deliver supports, including during school holidays.

• Growing our own workforce. Because qualified therapists are so scarce, we are exploring a “training-to-therapist” pipeline - engaging first- and second-year

occupational therapy, speech pathology and exercise-physiology students as support workers - to develop our own future clinical workforce.

•   Waitlists. We maintain therapy  waitlists, managed within our systems, precisely

because demand routinely exceeds the staff available to meet it.

This experience leads directly to a concern about how underutilisation is read. When a child’s funding goes unspent, it is in our experience very often because no suitable worker or therapist could be found - not because the child’s need has fallen. In a market as thin as ours, unspent funds are far more often a sign of a supply barrier, and reducing the funding in response simply entrenches that barrier. Any mechanism that reduces funding - a broad reduction power, a price cap, or a reassessment - should not treat underspend as evidence of reduced need.

Recommendation. Ensure that no funding reduction, price cap or reassessment treats unspent funds as evidence of reduced need, and that workforce and market availability are expressly recognised as a cause of underspend.

7. The cumulative effect on supply We ask the Committee to weigh these measures together, not only one by one. A broader registration net (s 10C), a shorter claims window (Schedule 2, Part 5), maximum prices that may sit below the cost of complex delivery (s 45C), and ratio caps (s 33(2EA)) all press on the same point: the availability of the specialist, relationship-based supports that children with complex needs depend on. Each measure may be defensible in isolation. In combination, in a market already constrained by workforce shortage and delivered in our case by a volunteer run service, they make it harder to recruit, retain and sustainably deploy the clinicians and support workers our students need. We respectfully suggest that the Bill’s integrity and pricing

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Submission 829

Darling Point Special School P&C Association - Executive representatives

measures would benefit from an assessment of their combined impact on workforce and service supply.

8. Further provisions affecting our service delivery We raise two further provisions more briefly, in each case only from the perspective of their practical effect on the services we deliver to our students.

8.1 Allied health and the evidence hierarchy (s 34(1E)-(1F)). As a purchaser and deliverer of allied health, we track our therapy against individual goals - including through goal-based planning and our system-based therapy records - and we regularly see children make real progress from individualised communication, sensory and occupational-therapy supports. Provisions that rank generalisable, peer-reviewed research above a child’s own demonstrated outcomes risk defunding therapy that we can see working but for which the published evidence base, for a highly heterogeneous population, has not yet caught up. That directly affects which

supports we can sustainably  offer. We recommend  that a  participant’s demonstrated

outcomes be given weight alongside, not below, generalisable research.

8.2 Automated decision-making (ss 59B, 59E). As a provider we administer plan funding and assist families to do the same. Automated evaluative decisions about whether supports are reasonable and necessary (s 59B(4)), coupled with safeguards that do not invalidate non compliant decisions (ss 59E(3), (5)), would in our experience increase the administrative burden of correcting errors - a burden that, for us, falls on a volunteer committee already stretched for administrative capacity - and add uncertainty to the funding on which we plan staffing and services. We recommend that automation be confined to genuinely mechanical actions and exclude evaluative determinations.

9. Consolidated recommendations The Association supports the intent of the Bill and its sustainability and integrity objectives, and recommends that it be amended before passage to address the following:

• Provider registration (s 10C): settle the scope of mandatory registration in the Act with small and specialist providers in mind, calibrated to risk, and not expandable by rule.

• Claims window (Sch 2, Pt 5): reconsider or lengthen the 90-day window, with transitional relief and an exception pathway for small and volunteer-run providers and for self-managers.

• Price-setting (s 45C): retain it, but ensure maximum prices reflect the genuine cost of specialist and complex-needs delivery, with appropriate complexity loadings and consultation of specialist providers, recognising that prices set below cost will force specialist services to close.

• Banding and ratios (Sch 4 s 32K(3B)-(3C); s 33(2EA)): remove the worker-to- participant ratio cap; ensure no funding cap sits below the cost of safe delivery; and retain individual assessment above any band.

  • Workforce and underutilisation: ensure no funding reduction, price cap or

reassessment treats unspent funds as reduced need; recognise workforce and market availability as causes of underspend; and assess the combined workforce and supply impact of the integrity and pricing measures.

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Submission 829

Darling Point Special School P&C Association - Executive representatives

•  Evidence  (s  34(1E)-(1F)):  give a  participant’s demonstrated outcomes  weight

alongside, not below, generalisable research.

•  Automated decision-making  (ss 59B,  59E):  confine automation  to  genuinely

mechanical actions and exclude evaluative determinations.

10. Closing The Association supports a sustainable, well-governed NDIS. We handle public money, we want it protected, and we welcome the integrity and sustainability objectives of this Bill. Our concern is a practical one, drawn from the day-to-day experience of a volunteer-run service recruiting staff, contracting therapists and delivering supports to children with complex needs: that several of the Bill’s measures, individually reasonable, may together reduce the supply and viability of the specialist services those children rely on.

We believe these concerns can be addressed by amendment without compromising the Bill’s objectives, and we would welcome the opportunity to assist the Committee with any operational detail it may find useful. We thank the Committee for the opportunity to make this submission.

This submission is made, and endorsed, by three members of the Executive Committee of the Darling Point Special School P&C Association who are responsible for the operation of the Association’s registered NDIS services. Our names have been withheld from the published submission at our request, and have been provided to the Committee secretariat together with our contact details.

Darling Point Special School P&C Association - PO Box 5173, Manly QLD 4179 - (07) 3348 0111

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