School to Work Transition for Students with Disability in Tasmania

The transition from school to post-school life is the most consequential and most under-advocated phase of a disabled student's educational experience. Most parents have spent years fighting for adequate support within the school system. When Year 10 approaches, many don't realize that the school has mandatory obligations for transition planning — and that failing to fulfill those obligations can leave a student without appropriate post-school support at precisely the moment they most need it.

In Tasmania, getting the school-to-work transition right is both a policy requirement and an advocacy challenge.

What the Law Requires

The Tasmanian Education Act 2016 requires students to participate in an Approved Learning Program until they complete Year 12, attain a Certificate III, or turn 18. For students with disabilities, what that post-school pathway looks like requires active planning, and that planning is mandated.

DECYP policy requires that all Year 10 students develop a Transition Plan covering post-school pathways. For students with disabilities, this obligation has additional weight: the school is required to actively coordinate with post-school systems, not simply encourage the family to figure it out themselves.

This means that if your child is in Year 9 or 10 with a disability, you should already be asking the school a direct question: "What is the transition planning process for students with disabilities at this school, and when does [Child's Name]'s Transition Plan development begin?"

NDIS School Leavers Employment Supports (SLES)

For students with NDIS plans, School Leavers Employment Supports (SLES) is a specific funding category that provides intensive support during the transition from school to employment or vocational training. SLES helps young people with disability build the skills they need to move into the workforce — job exploration, workplace skills, travel training, money management, and supported employment experiences.

SLES must be included in the student's NDIS plan before they leave school. This requires the school's active involvement in the NDIS planning process — specifically, ensuring that the NDIS plan review that precedes the student's final year of school reflects the transition support needs that have been documented in the school's Learning Plan and Transition Plan.

Schools that fail to engage with the NDIS plan review process at transition are failing their policy obligations. If your child is approaching the final years of school and their NDIS plan has not been reviewed to include transition supports, raise this formally with the school and with your NDIS planner.

Disability Employment Services (DES)

Disability Employment Services is a federal government program that provides employment assistance to people with disability. DES providers are funded to help people find and maintain sustainable employment, including through job placement, on-the-job support, and employer liaison.

DES is most useful after school completion or during TAFE/vocational training — it is not a school-based service. But introducing it during the Transition Plan process ensures the family knows it exists and can connect with a DES provider promptly after the student leaves school.

TasTAFE and University of Tasmania Access

If your child's post-school pathway involves further education rather than direct employment, TasTAFE and the University of Tasmania both have disability and accessibility services that provide academic adjustments, assistive technology, and individual support plans.

The critical advocacy point: these services require documentation, and the documentation is most easily obtained while your child is still at school. An OT report, a psychologist's report, or a TASC reasonable adjustments approval from Years 11–12 provides the foundation for a post-school institution's own support assessment.

TASC — the Office of Tasmanian Assessment, Standards and Certification — manages reasonable adjustments for Level 3 and 4 external assessments in Years 11–12. TASC's evidentiary requirement is significant: adjustments are approved only when the school can demonstrate that the same adjustments have already been documented in the student's Learning Plan and used in internal assessments. This means that the Learning Plan documentation your child has accumulated throughout their schooling is directly relevant to TASC eligibility — and that gaps in documentation during earlier years will create evidentiary problems at the senior secondary stage.

What the School Should Be Doing

In the year 10 transition process for a student with a disability, the school should be:

1. Developing a formal Transition Plan in collaboration with the student, the family, and relevant professionals
2. Facilitating connection with NDIS transition supports, including coordination with the NDIS planner
3. Identifying post-school pathways — employment, vocational training, supported employment, or post-secondary education — and documenting them in the plan
4. Connecting the family with Disability Employment Services and, if relevant, TasTAFE or university disability services
5. Ensuring the student's TASC reasonable adjustments are documented and applied consistently in internal assessments from Year 11

If the school is not initiating this process, you can. Write formally to the school asking for a Transition Plan to be developed, citing DECYP's Career Education Transition Planning Policy. Name the specific post-school systems you want the school to engage with on your child's behalf.

When the Transition Process Breaks Down

The most common failure point in disability transition planning in Tasmania is the coordination gap between school and post-school systems. The school focuses on getting the student through Year 12. The NDIS focuses on the current plan year. DES can't engage until the student has left school. Post-secondary disability services can't engage until the student enrolls.

The result is a cliff-edge at school exit, where a young person with disability loses their school-based support structure with no post-school supports in place.

Preventing that cliff requires planning that begins no later than Year 9 and involves formal, documented engagement with each post-school system. The parent often needs to drive this process — not because it's their legal responsibility to do so, but because the school frequently lacks the administrative bandwidth to coordinate it proactively.

A formal written request to the school — asking for a Transition Plan meeting that includes NDIS coordination, post-school pathway documentation, and connection to relevant services — creates the accountability for the school to act.

The Tasmania Disability Advocacy Playbook covers the post-school transition process in detail, including the DECYP transition planning requirements, the NDIS SLES process, and the documentation framework that ensures your child arrives at post-school life with the evidence base they need to access institutional support. The transition phase is too important to navigate without understanding what the school is required to do — and what you need to ask for when it doesn't.

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