NDIS and School Support in Victoria: Understanding Where the Funding Boundary Actually Sits

Your child has both an NDIS plan and support through their Victorian government school. You'd think these two systems would coordinate seamlessly. In practice, families find themselves caught in the gap between them — with each side pointing to the other as responsible for a particular support, and your child going without.

This post explains how the NDIS and the Victorian education system divide responsibility, where the overlap genuinely exists, and what families can do to navigate the grey areas.

The Core Principle: Two Different Scopes

The division of responsibility between the NDIS and the Victorian Department of Education (DET) is conceptually clear, even if the practical implementation gets messy:

The school system is responsible for:

• Educational access — ensuring your child can access and participate in learning on the same basis as other students
• Pedagogical adjustments — modifications to curriculum, teaching methods, and assessment
• Reasonable adjustments required under the Disability Standards for Education 2005

The NDIS funds:

• Daily living supports — skill development, community access, personal care
• Functional capacity building — therapy aimed at improving independence in daily life
• Equipment and assistive technology that supports independence across all environments

In principle, if a support is primarily about learning and education, it's the school's responsibility. If it's about daily life functioning and independence more broadly, it's the NDIS's domain.

Where It Gets Complicated: Therapy at School

The most common overlap scenario involves allied health therapy — occupational therapy, speech pathology, physiotherapy. The question of who funds a therapist to visit your child's school comes up constantly, and the answer genuinely depends on the purpose of the therapy.

NDIS-funded therapists can visit schools to:

• Observe the student in the classroom environment to inform their NDIS therapy goals
• Provide recommendations to the school about environmental modifications or equipment
• Work with the student on capacity-building goals that happen to take place in a school setting (e.g., practicing self-regulation strategies that will also be used at home and in the community)

The school is responsible for:

• Implementing the therapist's educational recommendations in the classroom
• Ensuring any classroom modifications the therapist recommends are actually made
• Funding therapy that is primarily educational in nature (e.g., a speech pathologist providing language curriculum support)

Where this breaks down: NDIS plan managers sometimes write plans that explicitly fund "support in school" in a way that shifts educational responsibility onto the NDIS plan. Schools sometimes rely on NDIS funding for therapy that, by rights, they should be providing or funding. Families end up as the unpaid administrators of a coordination problem between two large bureaucracies.

The critical thing to understand is that even if an NDIS-funded therapist is working with your child at school, the school cannot use this as a reason to reduce its own obligations. The DET's policy is explicit: the existence of NDIS funding does not reduce the school's legal requirement to make reasonable adjustments under the DSE 2005.

NDIS Plan Reviews and School Evidence

One practical area where the two systems directly interact is in NDIS plan reviews. Schools can provide evidence — in the form of IEPs, NCCD data, SSG minutes, and teacher observations — that supports or informs the NDIS planning process. This evidence can be valuable in demonstrating the level of support your child requires across environments.

Conversely, NDIS reports from allied health professionals are routinely used as evidence in Disability Inclusion Profile (DIP) meetings. An OT functional capacity report, for example, can demonstrate the level of adjustment required in an educational context — supporting a case for Tier 3 funding.

Families should understand that the DIP meeting specifically assesses functional needs in educational domains. NDIS reports are most useful in DIP meetings when they explicitly describe the educational impact of the disability — for example, "requires frequent sensory breaks during sustained cognitive tasks to avoid emotional dysregulation" rather than "has ASD."

The Funding Overlap: Assistive Technology

Assistive technology is the most contested funding overlap area. A communication device, FM hearing system, or specialist seating may be needed across home, school, and community environments. Both the NDIS and the DET's Equipment Boost for Schools (EBS) program may have legitimate contributions to make.

The DET's position is that schools should use EBS funding for equipment primarily needed for educational access. The NDIS funds equipment for broader functional capacity. In practice:

• A communication device used primarily for academic participation at school should be funded through EBS
• A communication device primarily used for daily life communication should be funded through the NDIS
• When the device serves both purposes, there is genuine ambiguity — and families often spend months stuck in that ambiguity

If you're in this situation, get both parties to state their position in writing. Bring the written NDIS position to the SSG meeting and ask the school to formally respond. "NDIS will fund it" is not a sufficient reason for the school to decline to apply for EBS funding for equipment that primarily serves an educational purpose.

NDIS School Leaver Provisions

For students approaching the end of their schooling, the NDIS has specific provisions for School Leavers Employment Supports (SLES) and capacity-building funding that helps transition-age students move into employment, TAFE, or community participation.

This is a separate conversation from school-based IEP transition planning, but the two need to be coordinated. NDIS plan reviews for Year 10-12 students should be timed to align with school transition planning, so that post-school NDIS supports are in place before the student finishes Year 12.

Raise this in your child's SSG if they are in Years 10-12 with NDIS funding: "Is the school's transition planning coordinated with our NDIS plan review timeline?"

Practical Steps for Victorian Families Navigating Both Systems

1. At each SSG meeting, ask the school to confirm which supports are being delivered through school funding versus NDIS — and request that this is documented in the minutes

2. Before each NDIS plan review, request updated reports from the school (IEP, teacher observation reports, OT school observations) that can inform the plan

3. When a therapist visits the school, clarify whether the visit is funded through the NDIS plan or school budget, and what the agreed scope of the visit is — observational, direct therapy, or consultation with teachers

4. If the school says your child's NDIS plan covers an equipment need, ask them to state in writing that the school has determined the equipment is not required for educational access and therefore EBS funding is not appropriate

5. Document all verbal conversations about NDIS-school funding in follow-up emails. The funding boundary disputes that go unresolved are almost always the ones where no one wrote anything down

The NDIS-school funding intersection is one of the most practically complex areas Victorian families navigate. The Victoria Disability Support Blueprint includes a guide to DIP meetings, SSG documentation templates, and a framework for managing the NDIS-school interface so neither system uses the other as a reason to do less.

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