The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement: What It Means for Queensland Families with Disability

In late 2024 and into 2025, a new bilateral funding agreement between the Australian Government and the states came into effect: the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement 2025–2034. For Queensland parents advocating for children with disability, this agreement matters — not as a cure for the system's chronic failures, but as a policy lever that adds weight to specific advocacy arguments.

This post explains what the agreement actually commits to, where the gaps are, and how you can reference it in advocacy correspondence without overstating what it delivers.

What the Agreement Is

The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement (BFSA) replaces the previous National School Reform Agreement as the bilateral funding framework between the Commonwealth and each state and territory government. Queensland has signed its own bilateral agreement with the Commonwealth under the BFSA umbrella.

The agreement ties federal funding to specific equity commitments. The defined equity cohorts include:

• Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students
• Students with disability
• Students in regional, rural and remote areas
• Students with low English proficiency

This is the critical point for families with disability: the federal government's recurrent school funding to Queensland is now explicitly conditioned on the state implementing defined reform measures for students in these cohorts.

What Queensland Has Committed To for Students with Disability

Under the BFSA, Queensland has committed to a range of reforms targeting students with disability, including but not limited to:

• Improving identification and support through the NCCD framework, including stronger school-level monitoring of whether identified students are receiving documented adjustments
• Building workforce capability — teacher training on disability, inclusive pedagogy, and behaviour support
• Transparent reporting on outcomes for students with disability, including attendance, achievement, and post-school transitions
• Reducing the use of School Disciplinary Absences (SDAs) for students with disability — a long-standing issue documented extensively by Queensland Advocacy for Inclusion, which has estimated that approximately 3,000 Queensland students with disability fail to complete Year 12 annually due to suspensions

Importantly, the agreement cross-references Queensland's own Disability Service Plan 2025–2028, which sets specific targets for the Department of Education regarding inclusion outcomes, reasonable adjustment delivery, and complaint resolution processes.

What the Agreement Does Not Do

The agreement does not:

• Provide individual parents with new direct legal rights that didn't exist before (the DSE 2005 and DDA remain the binding frameworks)
• Create a new complaints mechanism — existing escalation pathways through the DoE, QHRC, and AHRC remain unchanged
• Ring-fence funding per student with disability — the NCCD-based RAR model continues to flow funding at school level
• Set enforceable timelines at the school level for implementing individual adjustments

It is a bilateral government-to-government funding and reform framework. Its force operates at the system level, not at the individual school meeting level.

How to Reference It in Advocacy

Despite these limitations, the BFSA has real advocacy utility when used strategically.

Use it to invoke system-level accountability. When a principal tells you that what you're asking for is beyond what the school can provide, a letter that references Queensland's bilateral commitments under the BFSA — specifically the commitment to improving NCCD-linked adjustment delivery and reducing SDAs — signals that you understand the regulatory environment at a higher level than most parents. It positions your complaint as part of a pattern of system failure that the state has already acknowledged in a federal funding agreement.

Use it with the Disability Service Plan. The Queensland Department of Education's Disability Service Plan 2025–2028 is a concrete document with specific actions and targets. When you are writing a formal complaint or an escalation letter to a Regional Director, you can cross-reference the specific DSP commitments that the school or region is failing to meet. This is not abstract — the DSP commits the department to defined timelines and outcomes.

Use it in complaints to the Regional Office. When escalating beyond the principal, a complaint that references the department's own published commitments under the BFSA and the DSP is harder to dismiss as a one-off parent concern. You are describing a systemic obligation the department has accepted, not just describing what you want for your child.

Use it in QHRC submissions. If you reach the point of lodging a formal complaint with the Queensland Human Rights Commission, including context about Queensland's BFSA commitments alongside the specific discrimination complaint demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of the regulatory environment and strengthens the systemic framing of your complaint.

The Disability Service Plan 2025–2028 Specifically

It's worth distinguishing the federal BFSA from Queensland's own Disability Service Plan (DSP), because the DSP is specifically enforceable in complaints about the Department of Education's own conduct.

The DSP 2025–2028 sets out what the Department has committed to delivering for students with disability. Relevant commitments include:

• Ensuring all students with disability have documented Personalised Learning Plans reviewed annually
• Building principal and teacher capability in implementing reasonable adjustments
• Improving the quality and consistency of NCCD data collection and verification
• Reducing the rate of SDAs for students with disability
• Ensuring complaint and escalation processes are accessible and clearly communicated to families

If your child does not have a documented Personalised Learning Plan that has been reviewed in the last 12 months, that is a potential DSP non-compliance point. If you have lodged a formal complaint and the school did not acknowledge it within 3 days or resolve it within 30 days, that is a Customer Complaints Management Procedure failure that the DSP commits to addressing.

Inclusion vs. New Special Schools: The Policy Contradiction

The BFSA and DSP exist in some tension with another development in Queensland: the announcement of six new state special schools to be built across the state. Advocates — including Queensland Advocacy for Inclusion — have publicly challenged whether building new segregated settings is consistent with Queensland's stated commitment to inclusive education under both the BFSA and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

For parents deciding between a mainstream placement with reasonable adjustments and a special school, this policy tension is worth understanding. The official policy framework asserts inclusion as the default. The system is simultaneously expanding segregated settings. That gap is a live advocacy battleground.

If you have been told that your child "belongs in a special school" without adequate documentation that mainstream adjustments have been genuinely tried and exhausted, you can point to both the BFSA equity commitments and Queensland's Inclusive Education Policy as grounds to challenge that recommendation.

What to Do With This Information Right Now

If your child's school is failing to provide documented adjustments, the BFSA and DSP do not give you a new complaint button to push. Your primary legal tools remain:

1. DSE 2005 compliance demands
2. DDA and Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 (Qld) protections
3. DoE Customer Complaints Management Procedure
4. Queensland Ombudsman (administrative failures)
5. QHRC and AHRC (discrimination complaints)

What the BFSA and DSP give you is stronger framing in every piece of correspondence you write. When you describe your child's situation, you can situate it within a system-level failure that the Queensland government has already acknowledged and committed to address in a federal funding agreement.

That context — handled correctly — changes the tone of your complaint from "one angry parent" to "documented system failure in a context of explicit bilateral obligations."

The Queensland Disability Advocacy Playbook includes escalation letter templates that reference the DSE 2005, Anti-Discrimination Act, and the department's own policy commitments — the tools that back up a complaint with the legal and policy language that forces schools and regional offices to take the matter seriously.

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