Students with disability

It said we should introduce a disability loading urgently, as part of its broader recommendation that all schools should be funded on the basis of student need.

Both major parties recognised the crisis in disability education and the Gonski Review's disability loading became a bi-partisan position in the lead up to the 2013 election.

The Coalition stated that: "We have long argued that the current funding arrangements for students with disability and learning difficulty are unfair and inequitable. If elected to Government the Coalition will continue the data collection work that has commenced, which will be used to deliver more funding for people with disability through the 'disability loading' in 2015."

An interim loading – a flat rate based only on the number of students already getting funding – was introduced in 2014, with the significantly bigger loading, based on actual need, to come in from 2015.

Despite their promise, the Abbott Government did not set aside any money in the 2014/15 Federal Budget to fund the needs-based loading, and has tried to muddy the waters by claiming that extending the interim loading to 2015 is all that was promised.

However the announcement from the Education Ministers meeting confirmed this was not the case, and blamed poor data collection for the delay. Data collection has been an issue for too long, and the lack of urgency to improve it should not be used to short-change students with disability.

The key issue is that overcoming a shortfall in funding is likely to be expensive – bureaucrats have privately estimated it could cost $2 billion per year across Australia – and there is no commitment from the Abbott Government to needs-based funding.

We are already seeing the results of this underfunding, and the frustrations it causes for students, parents and teachers.

The latest PricewaterhouseCoopers report found that, in some cases, schools were meeting the needs of students with disability from within their own already strained budgets due to a lack of targeted funding.

We should not have a situation where a lack of support means students with disability cannot be properly included in school life and are denied the full education others take for granted.

To fail these children is not acceptable. Properly funding students with disability will cost billions of dollars, but is an investment in their future and in basic justice, and it is an investment we must make.