Aggregate disability statistics suggest the schooling sectors share responsibility, but they can conceal where the most complex support needs actually land – and what public schools are expected to absorb.
Disability statistics are used, reasonably, to suggest that Australian schooling shares a common burden. What they cannot show is who carries it when it becomes heaviest. An aggregate figure treats a child needing occasional reassurance and one requiring constant supervision as interchangeable units. The question is not whether the numbers are accurate, but what their design leaves invisible.
I was recently talking with a deputy principal at a NSW public high school. He was not complaining about having to enrol a child with complex needs. His school does not turn children with complex needs into somebody else’s problem. It serves a community familiar with disadvantage and has long welcomed young people whom other schools might find inconvenient, disruptive or simply too hard.
What I heard in his voice was something different. It was anguish.
The child approaching Year 7 is autistic and has exceptionally high support needs. He currently attends a specialist class in his primary school, where there are fewer students, specialist teachers and additional assistance. Even there, he can presently manage only a half day attendance. He is one of three arriving this intake from specialist settings; the other two are less extreme, but neither can yet sit through a mainstream primary classroom, let alone a mainstream secondary one.
No one familiar with the child believes he is ready to spend a full day in a mainstream secondary classroom. Yet there is no suitable specialist placement available for him in the secondary system. He must therefore be enrolled in the local public high school, not because anyone has concluded that it offers the environment he needs, but because it is the school that cannot say no.
The deputy principal knows what this may mean. A secondary teacher could be expected to keep this child safe, respond to episodes of profound distress, adapt learning far beyond the normal range of the class and respond to behaviour arising from an environment the child may be unable to tolerate while remaining responsible for the learning and safety of perhaps twenty-nine other students.
The deputy principal’s anguish was not a failure of compassion. It came from compassion informed by experience. He could foresee the distress awaiting the child, the impossible responsibility being transferred to teachers, and the effect on the learning environment of other students. He also knew his school would welcome the child, rearrange what it could, and try to make the placement work.
The enrolment will be recorded as inclusion. But enrolment is not provision. Placing a child inside a school does not establish that the school has been given the conditions necessary for him to belong, regulate and learn.
Eventually, this child will become another number in the public system’s disability statistics. They will not record that an appropriate place was unavailable, the resources the school did not receive, or why responsibility for the most complex disability support needs so often arrives at the public-school gate.
The numbers will show where the child was enrolled, not what the under-supported placement required or what the school was expected to absorb.
Nor is this a one-off. The Department is expanding specialist primary classes, which means, arithmetically, more children will exit intensive primary support into mainstream secondary at once, as if the transition itself resolved the need. That transition already lands at early adolescence, when developmental change makes school harder for every student. I understand that the Department knows these secondary placements will rely on teachers without specialist training.
This is not only a story about three children. It is a description of how the category “student with disability” is constructed at a level of generality that makes exactly this kind of cost-shifting invisible and it is worth showing precisely how.
In 2023, approximately 26 per cent of students in NSW public schools were identified as students with disability, compared with around 21 per cent in Catholic schools and around 22 per cent in independent schools. The public-school proportion is higher, but not dramatically so. On these figures alone, the non-government sector can reasonably say: one in five of our students are students with disability too; we share this responsibility.
The unanswered question is which one in five.
The Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability uses four broad categories, cognitive, social-emotional, physical and sensory and records adjustment levels from differentiated teaching to extensive support. It cannot adequately distinguish a student needing occasional rest breaks from a profoundly autistic child requiring continuous supervision. Both count once; the aggregate conveys little about what each student’s education requires of the school.
Using aggregate NCCD figures to claim that every sector carries a comparable disability load is therefore a category error: data collected for one purpose is made to answer another, and its silence is treated as evidence that no significant difference exists.
This does not suggest dishonest reporting. Schools across all sectors may be reporting accurately and in good faith; some Catholic and independent schools make serious efforts with complex needs. The problem is architectural, not behavioural: broad categories can establish total adjustments while concealing whether students with profound support needs are concentrated in particular sectors, and it is the subsequent claim, that similar percentages demonstrate a genuinely shared load, that the data cannot support.
The aggregate cannot show which sector educates students requiring continuous supervision, specialised teaching, personal care or crisis intervention. Nor can it identify the schools families can still enrol in after others have concluded, formally or informally, that they are not the right fit. A school accommodating many less intensive disabilities may report a substantial disability population. Placed beside a public school managing profound disability, extreme dysregulation and serious safety concerns, the figures look comparable. Educationally, they may describe entirely different institutions.
If private and Catholic schools wish to point to their aggregate disability enrolments as evidence of a shared load, the answer is not to dispute the figures. It is to ask what those figures have been combined to conceal and to say plainly that the concealment is a design feature of the collection, not a failure of anyone’s arithmetic.
One in five students may be identified as students with disability, in every sector. The question the numbers were never built to answer is which fifth each sector was prepared to accept and which fifth, like the boy waiting to start Year 7 with no specialist place to go to, ends up wherever the door cannot be closed.
John Frew worked in public education, including as foundation principal at a secondary school for students with Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Disturbance. John has authored numerous books the latest being ‘Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids’. Since retiring, he has continued to comment on social issues.