The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) represents a milestone in Australian social policy. But despite the importance of the NDIS for Australians with disabilities, there are ongoing concerns regarding equitable access to support that risk undermining the effective operation of the scheme. Previous evidence on this topic has been largely qualitative, with no existing quantitative evidence of equitable access to support for children with disabilities. Consequently, we collected a new survey (the Better Support for Kids with Disabilities survey) of parents or carers of children with disabilities (aged 2-17), focussing on use of services, experiences of disability support, and unmet needs for support.
The current article analyses unmet needs for support among Australian children with disabilities using data from the Better Support for Kids with Disabilities survey. Our findings show that most children with disabilities (83%) have unmet needs for support, with a sample average of 2.3 different unmet needs. The most common unmet needs were for therapy, school-based support, and support workers. The most common reasons for unmet needs were exclusion of the support from the child’s NDIS plan, provider availability, and cost. Unmet needs were inequitably distributed: after accounting for differences in the child’s functional difficulties and disability types, higher number of unmet needs was associated with lower family income, the presence of adults with disabilities, single parent families, and residence in regional or remote areas.
Our findings indicate that there are substantial unmet needs for support among Australian children with disabilities and that these unmet needs are inequitably distributed. As state and federal governments embark on the ambitious program of reforms proposed by the recent NDIS review, there is a pressing need for monitoring to track patterns and changes in equitable access to support. Existing data is insufficient for this task due to the absence of dedicated surveys of families of children with disabilities and the lack of measures of functional limitations.