National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 993
Submission to the Senate Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment
(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
I am making this submission as the parent of a young child with significant developmental delays who relies on early intervention supports to build functional capacity and work toward school readiness.
My concern is that the current direction of NDIS decision-making, alongside the proposed legislative changes, risks reducing access to meaningful and sufficiently intensive early intervention supports during the most critical developmental years of a child’s life.
In my son’s case, assessment findings and supporting evidence reportedly placed his functional capacity at a level comparable to that of a 9-month-old child across key developmental domains. Despite this, the recommended intervention response was limited to two one-hour therapy sessions per week.
As a parent, I struggle to understand how this level of intervention could reasonably be expected to address or close such a substantial developmental gap within the approximately two years remaining before school commencement.
This appears inconsistent with established early intervention principles, which emphasise the importance of timely, intensive, consistent, and multidisciplinary supports during the critical neurodevelopmental window before school age.
I am also deeply concerned by the increasing tendency to treat inclusion support funding within early education settings, such as childcare and day care, as though it is equivalent to specialised developmental intervention.
While inclusion support funding may provide additional staffing assistance to help a child participate within the environment, childcare educators are not typically trained or resourced to deliver intensive therapeutic or developmental interventions for children with significant developmental delays.
In practice, these supports are often shared across multiple children and focused primarily on supervision, participation, safety, and general inclusion within the classroom setting. They are not designed to provide the level of individualised developmental support required for a child who is substantially behind their peers in areas such as communication, emotional regulation, adaptive functioning, social interaction, and learning readiness.
In my son’s case, the gap between his developmental functioning and that of his peers remains significant, particularly in communication and engagement. Simply increasing shared inclusion support hours within a mainstream educational environment does not address the underlying developmental barriers preventing him from meaningfully accessing or keeping pace with the educational and social experiences occurring around him.
After approximately two years of access to inclusion support within the childcare environment, there has been limited evidence of measurable developmental progression sufficient to reduce the significant functional delays identified in his assessments. The
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 993
support has largely functioned as participation and supervision assistance rather than structured capacity-building intervention designed to improve long-term functional outcomes.
There appears to be a fundamental disconnect between:
● supporting a child’s attendance within an educational setting; and ● delivering targeted developmental intervention necessary to improve the child’s ability to participate, communicate, regulate, learn, and progress over time.
This distinction is critically important.
General inclusion support should not be viewed as an adequate substitute for specialised early intervention supports delivered by appropriately trained professionals.
I am concerned that proposed changes to the NDIS framework may further entrench decisions that prioritise cost containment over developmental outcomes, particularly for young children in critical early intervention windows.
Failure to provide sufficiently intensive and individualised early intervention supports does not remove a child’s developmental needs — it simply shifts greater complexity and support needs into later childhood, the education system, families, and broader community services.
I urge the Committee to carefully consider the long-term consequences of reducing or narrowing access to capacity-building supports for children with significant developmental delays, particularly where assessment evidence already demonstrates profound functional impairment and vulnerability.
Kind regards,