The 2026 NCCD shift that most schools have not registered yet.

............and what it means before the August NCCD census.

The Federal Budget 2026/27 did something almost no one in the school system has fully registered yet. It formally tightened compliance and integrity measures around school funding, and in doing so it changed the question every principal in Australia will be expected to answer about their NCCD data. The old question was whether the school submitted the collection. The new question is whether the school can demonstrate that its funding claims are supported by genuine, evidence-based, inclusive practice. Those two questions sound similar but they are not the same, and the gap between them is exactly where scrutiny now lives.

The Department of Education has stated plainly that it intends to improve compliance activities to safeguard the Government’s investment in schooling. The National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment Act received Royal Assent in April, signalling a broader national direction around integrity, safeguarding, fraud reduction and compliance enforcement. None of these moves arrived in isolation. Taken together they form a single coherent signal, which is that disability funding is no longer being treated as an administrative line item but as a matter of public accountability and governance integrity.

Scrutiny, in the regulator’s vocabulary, means close and detailed examination. It means looking at whether consultation with families actually occurred, and if it did not, whether the reason was documented. It means checking that adjustments recorded on paper are visible in classrooms, across subjects and across teachers. It means asking whether an adjustment marked as extensive is operating continuously rather than appearing across a tidy ten-week window. And it means examining whether moderation is genuine professional judgement or whether it has quietly become a tick-box exercise.

None of this requires new legislation. The Disability Standards for Education 2005 are already law. The audit powers, funding agreements and compliance recovery mechanisms already exist. What is changing is the appetite to use them, and the speed with which schools that cannot defend their practices may find themselves having to.

The principals who feel calm about this are not the ones doing the most paperwork. They are the ones who have built leaner, smarter, more sustainable systems. They have a clear, school-based NCCD team. They use the documentation they already have, such as individual learning plans, adjustment records, annotated work samples and communication records, rather than creating new artefacts for compliance. They embed evidence in everyday teaching practices, in conversations, reviews and student work. They treat NCCD as a school improvement framework rather than a reporting obligation, and in doing so they have made inclusion something that lives in their school rather than something that sits in a folder or spreadsheet.

The 2026 environment is not asking for more work. It is asking for more accurate and defensible work, done in a way that is genuinely inclusive and serves the students behind the data.

Join Madeleine West and Meg Ryan for an unmissable Professional Learning Webinar on the 28th of May at 4pm - 5pm Sydney time. A recording, resources and certificates of completion will go to all attendees.

$49+GST

Simply reply to this email to register your interest. Invites will be released on Thursday.

Meg Ryan has joined the Safe on Social team as the Head of Inclusive Education.

Meg Ryan is a global leader in inclusive education consulting who has spent more than two decades working across the sector. She distils complexity into clarity, reads an audience and makes ideas land. She holds a Master of Education in Inclusive Education from QUT, a Bachelor of Education (Primary), and a Bachelor of Business in Communication, three degrees that together explain why her professional development sessions consistently receive standout feedback. She does not simply present information. She tells a story, builds a case, and brings people with her.

Her specialist focus is inclusive education, including NCCD (Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability) compliance and workflows, the DSE (2005) and DDA (1992), and inclusive pedagogy aligned with UDL (Universal Design for Learning) and MTSS (Multi-Tiered Systems of Support). She has conducted NCCD Quality Assurance in more than 55 Queensland schools and spent nearly four years managing inclusive education across 36 schools and secondary colleges within Brisbane networks. Principals trust her because she understands their world, the compliance pressures, the staff development needs, and the students who need championing. Meg is a systems thinker, and a steady advocate for inclusive education.