School students with disability

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Key Facts

In Australia in 2023:

991,272 school students received an educational adjustment due to disability – this represents 24.2% of total enrolments, up from 22.5% in 2022 and 18.0% in 2015.
2.2% of all school students were provided with extensive adjustments to enable them to participate in education on the same basis as other students. A further 4.3% were provided with substantial support, 10.4% were provided with supplementary support and 7.3% were supported through quality differentiated teaching practices.
Among school students who received an educational adjustment due to disability, 54.3% of adjustments were provided to students with cognitive disability, 33.6% to students with social-emotional disability, 9.3% for students with physical disability and 2.7% for sensory disability.

Why does ACARA collect and report on students with disability?

The Nationally Consistent Collection of Data (NCCD) on School Students with Disability collects data about Australian school students with disability who are receiving adjustments in a consistent, reliable and systematic way. It enables schools, education authorities and governments to better understand the needs of students with disability and how they can be best supported at school; and allocate resources efficiently.

What information is reported?

The NCCD on School Students with Disability identifies students who received an educational adjustment due to disability. Through this collection, teachers use their professional judgement based on evidence to capture information on:

The level of adjustment that students with disability are being provided to enable them to participate in education on the same basis as other students:
- support within quality differentiated teaching practice (QDTP)
- supplementary
- substantial
- extensive
the broad category of disability under which each student best fits:
- physical
- cognitive
- sensory
- social-emotional.

The collection is based on the broad definition of disability used in the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) and the Disability Standards for Education 2005.

Notes and caveats

The collection has been designed to collect information on the full range of students who receive adjustments to support their access and participation in learning because of disability as defined in the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA). Students with a medical diagnosis are a subset of those students who meet the definition of disability under the DDA and as a result, higher numbers of students are reported through the collection than in other data collections on students with disability.
Where a student has multiple disabilities, for the purposes of this collection they are only counted once in one disability category; the one that most drives the educational adjustments provided for them. Consequently, the data may under-represent the prevalence of some categories of disability.
Disaggregations by Level of Adjustment within Category of Disability are only available for total Australia.
For further information on levels of adjustment and data collection model, refer to the NCCD Portal website: https://www.nccd.edu.au/

Sources: Non-government Schools Census 2015-2023; Government Schools Data Submission 2015-2023.