Co-operation needed in classroom

Less than one month on from a national cabinet agreement that gives billions of dollars in extra funding to state governments, the test of whether they are prepared to honour their half of the bargain and work more co-operatively has arrived. The area of concern is education and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, where there has been a history of cost-shifting services from states to the commonwealth budget.

As social affairs editor Stephen Lunn reports on Friday, the need both to streamline NDIS services and deepen the level of care available in areas of traditional state responsibility is getting more pressing. This is particularly so in the classroom, where children with a disability increasingly are missing out. NDIS review co-chair Bruce Bonyhady says the whole approach has been to try to draw hard boundaries between the NDIS and education, when they should be working more closely together to jointly support the needs of children with disability.

Professor Bonyhady’s review called for a much more co-ordinated approach, with the two systems, NDIS and education, working together for the best outcomes for tens of thousands of children. Naturally, this will come at some cost. The worst outcome would be a duplication of services and bureaucratic oversight when what is needed is a more tightly targeted system that gets results for the children in need.

The priority goal must be to push ahead with the major finding of Professor Bonyhady’s review, which was to restore the NDIS to what was originally intended; that is, a safety net for the most profoundly disabled in our community. Mission creep has seen the cost of the NDIS blow out to the point it will soon become unsustainable unless something is done.

An unchecked broadening of the scope of the NDIS to include common childhood disorders – as well as a lack of buy-in from state governments, which have used it as a way to surrender their own responsibilities – have been major contributors to the cost blowout.

This was partly behind the December national cabinet decision in which state governments received extra health funding and an agreement by the commonwealth to extend the top-up of the GST, introduced to compensate for a guaranteed proportion of revenue given to Western Australia, for an additional three years at a cost of $3.5bn a year. In exchange, states agreed to do more of the heavy lifting on disability to help curb the NDIS. Here is their opportunity to deliver.