Page 1768 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 June 2014
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early intervention services are concerned that they do not know what the options for next year are for their children. Indeed, they have not even commenced their interactions with the NDIA or started to prepare their packages. No wonder, in light of that, they are concerned.
The Education and Training Directorate provides a number of early intervention programs for different groups of children between three and five years in the ACT. These include early intervention units, autism intervention units, the language intervention unit, early childhood centres, early childhood units and the early intervention playgroups. The criteria for each of these groups are different, with some being run by the local school and some by the special schools, Cranleigh and Malkara. There are around 300 children currently accessing those services, and I understand approximately 160 of those children will move into primary school next year, which leaves around 140 children for whom placements next year are unclear.
There has been some discussion about the forum held on Monday, which I was not able to go to, but one of my staff did. It involved the Community Services Directorate and the Education and Training Directorate. It was abundantly clear, I am told, that at that meeting there was concern. At its heart, that concern seemed to be about the readiness of services for the 2015 school year and the availability of suitable services for individual children. Given that at that time the government had not been able to announce who the new service providers were, that was not surprising.
What I understand is that some parents have expressed a concern that even with a term’s notice, they will not have time to prepare their child for the transition to a new service. That is probably a reasonable concern, given that the time frame has to not only include a transition but also include time to identify services available and meet with service providers to discuss services in detail, and for parents to ensure that they are appropriate for their child. On top of this, parents will have to start engagement with the NDIA. It is a lot to get done in one term, although in real time it is just under four months between then and the start of the new school year. However, while considering whether the solution to this problem was to delay the transition by a term or even a year, I decided that I thought not. I can appreciate that this may seem like a simple solution for parents and carers, but this is a big decision to take in regard to delaying the service delivery change, a big decision to effectively delay the rollout of the NDIS to an entire group.
I would prefer to see the rollout continue and for the directorates involved to ensure their very best efforts to make this happen in a way where parents feel heard and in an orderly way, such that children are able to transition effectively. It appears that the subtext is that the government will need to vacate the field of early intervention service provision in order for new providers to step up. So we are caught in a circular place here. There is an imperative to get those new providers at the table, but extending the provision of government services for another year may only result in a delay in bringing those providers on board, and therefore we may find ourselves in a very similar situation next year.
It certainly is not feasible, as Mr Wall’s motion suggests, that those alternative services are fully operational prior to the government services closing. It is an
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