Draft for member review. Feedback closes 12 noon (AEST), Thursday 1 October 2026.
Member feedback has closed. Thank you. We'll publish the final submission on this page once it's lodged.
Draft submission · Member review
Keep the relationship, raise the standard.
Our draft submission on the NDIS Support Coordination and Connection reform is ready. It sets out our model and 21 recommendations, and answers all 19 consultation questions with the evidence behind them. Before we lodge it, we want to hear from social workers.
Member feedback closes12 noon (AEST), Thursday 1 October 2026
We lodge the final submissionFriday 2 October 2026
In each region, a lead organisation arranges and oversees coordination through its Regional Coordination Leads, and doesn't compete with the coordinators it arranges. Coordination partners, from independent private practitioners to private, NGO and community-controlled organisations, deliver the coordination, and paid connection partners bring community expertise. Participants choose who works with them, and everyone works to one shared Coordination Plan that the participant owns.
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Illustrative. Which role an organisation takes depends on what it can do in that region, not on its type: each of the six kinds of expertise can come from a coordination partner, a connection partner or both. In large metropolitan regions, Fair Go also recommends more than one SCC organisation, or a lead organisation plus an accredited panel.
Two levels, matched to need
SCC: coordination partners and private practitioners, arranged and supported by the lead organisation's Regional Coordination Leads, for moderate and changing need, with weighted caseloads and quick step-up.
SCC+: a qualified social worker or allied health practitioner, small caseloads, and a team around the person, with a cross-system bridge to health, justice, child protection and housing built in (questions 5 and 11).
From today to 2028 and beyond
A funded bridge: everyone keeps their coordinator for 6 to 12 months from 1 July 2028, and keeps them after that if the coordinator successfully registers. Nobody tells their story again (question 12).
Test, publish, review: trials before national rollout, public data every quarter, and an independent review at three years (questions 1, 3 and 12).
Summary of recommendations
Our 21 recommendations
We support the reform's aims: better quality, clearer roles, fewer conflicts of interest and better access in thin markets. The problems the paper names are real. Our recommendations aim to keep what works today, especially trusted relationships and skilled practitioners, while fixing what doesn't. The full draft argues each one in detail.
Choice and relationships
Choice and control in the contract. Participants choose who provides their support coordination: a registered provider or an independent private practitioner, contracted by the coordination partner with matching expertise, or by the lead organisation on the NDIA's standard terms where there is none. A Regional Coordination Lead gives them a list only if they want one; the choice stays theirs. They can change without penalty and ask for a second opinion.
One shared Coordination Plan. Owned by the participant, on a free, secure NDIA platform, with consent controls, audit trails, data held in Australia and non-digital options.
Keep your coordinator. From 1 July 2028, everyone keeps their current coordinator for 6 to 12 months through a funded bridge, and keeps that coordinator after the bridge if the coordinator successfully registers, meeting the NDIS Practice Standards, and continues as a coordination partner. What they know is uploaded to the shared plan with consent; funded transition hours for every participant; no new applications during the bridge.
Commissioning and stewardship
A lead organisation that arranges and oversees, and doesn't compete. Regional Coordination Leads put each participant's choice into effect, never choosing for them, and support practitioners, oversee quality and, when participants ask, get their evidence to the NDIA. The lead coordinates directly only briefly, as a backstop. Coordination partners (private practitioners, private and NGO providers, and specialist community organisations) deliver coordination on the NDIA's standard terms. Paid connection partners bring community expertise, so every region has all six kinds (Aboriginal community-controlled, culturally specific, LGBTIQA+ affirming, psychosocial, disability-led and rural and remote). Leads are not-for-profit or community-controlled. More than one SCC organisation, or a lead plus a panel, in large metropolitan regions. Intake, the lists offered and referrals independently audited, with results published each quarter.
Commission on the 31 PHN regions, deliver locally. Local teams inside each region, remote and First Nations areas defined with communities, and boundaries that never limit choice.
Local knowledge defined community by community. A four-part test (accountable to, staffed from, connected to and endorsed by the community), scored with community panels.
Test, steward and review. Trials before national rollout, a named provider of last resort and step-in rights in every region, and an independent review at three years.
Funding
Fund SCC outside participant plans, mostly as base funding to assessed need. Price the whole job: award wages, supervision, travel, interpreters and non-billable work. Five-year contracts. Quality payments of 5% at most, and none that ration.
Fund presence, not distance. Base funding per participant, plus a guaranteed minimum payment to keep a local team in every thin-market area. Remote loadings on top, and travel paid by the commissioner, never from participants' plans.
Workforce and quality
Name the skills and set the standard. Qualifications by level. SCC+ led by practitioners with tertiary qualifications and at least two years' experience, and Regional Coordination Leads with at least three years', with social work named explicitly. NDIS Commission registration for every support coordinator and support coordination provider, kept by meeting the NDIS Practice Standards, and professional registration or accreditation for SCC+.
Protect professional supervision. Regular, qualified supervision, separate from line management, funded in the price and checked by observation.
Keep coordination independent. Adopt Royal Commission Recommendation 10.2: an NDIS Rule that a provider of support coordination should not also provide other funded supports in the participant's plan, with narrow, published exceptions for thin markets and culturally specific services. Fair Go would extend the rule to related entities. The lead organisation doesn't deliver coordination, except briefly as a backstop. A thin-market exception must never be used to keep new providers out.
Pay, pipeline and careers. Pay that matches qualifications, funded student placements, a supported first year, career paths from SCC to SCC+ and Regional Coordination Lead, and lived-experience and First Nations workforce pathways.
Count the workforce and publish the results. Qualifications, supervision, caseloads, continuity, participant experience and who each organisation serves, every quarter.
Complex needs, health and decisions
Two levels, matched to need. Weighted caseloads, quick step-up and step-down, no fail-first, and SCC+ entry based on need, not label.
SCC+ as the bridge across systems. Formal regional agreements for four strands. Health: PHNs and hospital networks, with joint protocols for hospital discharge and emergency pathways, named contacts, agreed response times and shared data on participants waiting for discharge. Justice: community corrections for probation and parole, youth justice, and release from custody planned before the day. Child protection: joint NDIA–state pathways for children at risk of relinquishment or in out-of-home care. Housing: homelessness services and social housing. SCC+ coordinates across each line and never crosses it. Piloted and evaluated, including its costs.
Across systems, never instead of them. Funded case conferences convened by Regional Coordination Leads, mental health built into the health strand, and a facilitated multi-agency team when a case is stuck. Each system keeps its own job.
Support decisions, never take them. Every coordinator trained in supported decision-making. Independent decision support and independent advocacy funded separately. Use "need for decision-making support", not "decision-making capacity", as an eligibility factor.
Assess once, share with the team. One shared assessment used by the whole team. Where more information is needed, the NDIA commissions and pays for reports, as the NDIS Review recommended, rather than participants paying for repeated standalone reports. When a participant asks, Regional Coordination Leads make sure the evidence they choose to share, including real-world evidence from their coordination, reaches the planner before a reassessment or needs assessment. They act for the participant, never as the NDIA's agent, and take no part in setting budgets. The support needs assessment rule, open for consultation until 14 October 2026, should name this consented evidence as information the assessor must consider.
Place, community and equity
Community-led SCC in remote and First Nations communities. Delivered by community-controlled organisations where communities want it, in one team with the Remote Community Connectors; local workers; face to face first; and every unmet need recorded and acted on.
Design and monitor for equity. Publish eligibility, access and outcomes by gender, age, disadvantage, disability type, remoteness and First Nations status, given the evidence of unequal access to the NDIS.
The full draft is for social workers and people who care about this work. Enter your name and email and we'll email you a private link. It includes:
what the research tells us about the support coordination workforce
the case for social workers in Level 3, specialist support coordination
where the NDIS meets health and child protection
our answers to all 19 consultation questions: 7 on what participants want, and 12 on provider models
the full answer to each provider question, with the evidence and every source
where the AASW Code of Ethics and Practice Standards already require what we recommend
a PDF to download, and a form to send us your feedback.
Fair Go members are getting the link by email. If yours hasn't arrived, ask for it again here.
How we prepared it
Built on evidence, checked against the source
A review of the research. For each question we searched OpenAlex, an open index of the world's research. For most questions we also used automated research tools to find government reports, data and other sources, and dropped any claim that could not be verified. The answers draw on 229 research publications with a DOI (221 of them journal articles) and about 80 government reports, laws, datasets, standards and news items, including the NDIS Review, the Disability Royal Commission, NDIA data and pricing, and NDIS Commission standards.
Checking every source. Every quotation, statistic and reference was then checked against its source. Where only a published abstract was available, quotations were checked against the abstract.
Declaration
Who we are
Fair Go for Social Work is an independent, grassroots advocacy group for social workers in Australia, run entirely by volunteers. We aren't a regulator, a union or part of the AASW, and Fair Go itself doesn't deliver NDIS supports. Social workers are among the practitioners who provide NDIS support coordination and other NDIS supports.
Our focus is the quality of coordination participants receive, and the workforce that delivers it. Social work's ethics put people's self-determination, rights and choice first. That is why we have answered every question, including those on commissioning, regions and payment: those design choices decide whether participants keep trusted relationships, whether they can choose who works with them, and whether skilled practitioners can do the work well. We support the views of people with disability and disability-led organisations, whose voices should carry the most weight on lived experience.
Declaration of interests: Everyone who leads Fair Go declares their interests in our public register of interests and stays out of decisions that affect their own organisation.