School Not Following Adjustments or ICP in QLD: How to Fight Back

Your child's adjustments were agreed. They're written down. And the school is still not doing them.

Maybe the ICP is sitting in a filing cabinet while the classroom teacher says they haven't been told about it. Maybe the reasonable adjustments agreed at last term's meeting have quietly disappeared. Maybe your child was left behind when the class went on excursion because "there weren't enough staff." Whatever the specific failure, the pattern is the same: the school made commitments it isn't keeping, and you're being left to manage the fallout.

This situation is not just frustrating. It's a legal breach. Here's how to document it, name it correctly, and force the school to act.

Why Non-Implementation Is a Legal Problem, Not Just a School Policy Problem

The Disability Standards for Education 2005 (DSE 2005) are federal subordinate legislation under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth). They are not optional guidelines. Part 5 of the DSE requires that education providers ensure students with disability can participate in learning on the same basis as their peers, and Part 6 requires adjustments to curriculum delivery. Critically, the Standards also mandate that schools consult with parents before deciding on, changing, or withdrawing adjustments.

When a school agrees to implement specific adjustments — in a meeting, in writing, or in an ICP — and then does not do so, it is in breach of the DSE 2005. The fact that a school is under-resourced, that staff are busy, or that a teacher wasn't briefed internally does not constitute a lawful defence.

Similarly, excluding your child from a school excursion because of their disability is a breach of DSE Part 5 (Participation), which requires equitable access to all school activities. The only lawful defence for exclusion is "unjustifiable hardship" — and simply not having an extra staff member available rarely meets that threshold when the Department of Education could reasonably arrange one.

Step 1: Document Everything Before You Send a Word

Before writing any formal correspondence, create a contemporaneous log. For each instance where an agreed adjustment was not provided, record:

• The date it was meant to occur
• What was agreed and where (meeting, email, ICP document)
• What actually happened
• Who was present or responsible

This log becomes the factual foundation of your formal complaint. Without it, schools can claim the adjustments were delivered differently or that there was a misunderstanding. With it, you have a timestamped, specific account they cannot easily dispute.

If you sent emails about this previously and received vague replies ("we're monitoring the situation," "we'll look into that"), save those too. Vague non-committal responses from school administration are a documented pattern of failure to remedy a known problem.

Step 2: Send a Post-Meeting Summary After Every School Meeting

One of the most powerful and underused advocacy tools is the post-meeting summary email. Within 24 hours of any meeting with school staff, send an email to the principal, the Head of Special Education Services (HOSES), and the classroom teacher summarising what was agreed, who is responsible for each action, and the timeline.

Use specific language: "As agreed in the meeting on [date], [teacher name] will provide [specific adjustment] every [day] beginning [date]." This creates a time-stamped, written record that is extremely difficult to walk back later.

If the school fails to act on what you've documented, your next formal letter can reference the exact email chain. You are not relying on memory — you are citing the school's own implicit agreement.

Step 3: Write a Formal Letter Citing the DSE 2005

Once you have documented the pattern and informal attempts have failed, it's time to send formal correspondence. The letter should:

Open with the legal frame. State clearly that you are writing regarding the school's failure to implement agreed adjustments as required under the Disability Standards for Education 2005, specifically Part 5 (Participation) and/or Part 6 (Curriculum Development, Accreditation and Delivery).

List specific instances. Reference your log: "On [date], [adjustment] was not provided despite being agreed at the [date] meeting (see attached email summary)." Do this for each documented instance.

Set a deadline for remediation. Request a written response within 10 business days confirming how and when each adjustment will be implemented, and who is responsible.

Name the next step. State that if the matter is not resolved to your satisfaction, you will be lodging a formal customer complaint under the Queensland Department of Education's Customer Complaints Management Procedure, and that you are also considering a complaint to the Queensland Human Rights Commission under the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 (Qld).

Address the letter to the school principal directly, and copy the HOSES.

The Excursion Exclusion: A Specific Scenario

Excursion exclusions are common and particularly galling because they are so visible. Your child watches their classmates leave while they stay behind with another teacher.

If this has happened, your formal letter must specifically request a copy of the risk assessment the school conducted before excluding your child. The school has a legal obligation to assess whether reasonable adjustments could have enabled participation — for example, hiring an additional support person for the day, modifying activities, or arranging alternative supervision. If no such assessment was conducted, or if the school cannot produce one, that is itself evidence of a failure to comply with the DSE.

Frame your letter this way: "I am requesting a copy of the documented risk assessment and unjustifiable hardship analysis that was conducted prior to [child's name]'s exclusion from [activity] on [date], as required under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and DSE 2005."

What the School Cannot Say

Schools often respond to these disputes with a set of standard deflections. Understanding them in advance means you won't be derailed:

"We don't have the budget for that." Under the RAR model, funding is allocated to the school based on NCCD data. The school has discretion over how it deploys that funding to meet its legal obligations — but the obligation itself exists regardless of internal budget decisions. The DSE does not include a "we're underfunded" exception.

"We're monitoring the situation." Monitoring is not implementing. If an adjustment was agreed, monitoring whether the student manages without it is not compliance.

"The teacher wasn't informed." This is an internal management failure, not a parent problem. The school's obligation to implement adjustments is not contingent on internal communication working perfectly.

"Your child's ICP hasn't been finalised yet." If adjustments were agreed informally or in a meeting, the obligation to implement them exists. The ICP does not need to be a perfectly formatted document before the school must act.

When the Letter Doesn't Work

If the school fails to respond adequately to your formal letter within the timeframe you set, the next step is a formal customer complaint under the Queensland Department of Education's Customer Complaints Management Procedure. The school must acknowledge your complaint within three business days and resolve it within 30 days (or 45 business days if the complaint engages human rights issues).

If the school's response to the formal complaint is still inadequate, you can escalate to the Regional Office, the Queensland Human Rights Commission, or the Queensland Ombudsman. Each of these pathways has its own process, but they all require you to have exhausted the school-level process first — which is exactly why documenting each step matters.

The Queensland Disability Advocacy Playbook contains ready-to-use letter templates for non-implementation disputes, post-meeting summary emails, and formal complaint correspondence — each explicitly citing the relevant sections of the DSE 2005 and the QLD Education Act. Get the complete toolkit at /au/queensland/advocacy/.

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