Page 3478 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 22 October 2014
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2. A group program once a week for 3 hours and they can only have a maximum of 70 children for the week. The group of children will have varying ranges of disabilities all in together …
3. A program will run once a week for 2 hours only if there are enough parents that have come forward and then they will try and group children together with similar needs …
4. A program once a week on a Saturday morning with children with varying needs, approximately 2 hours. This cuts into family time …
5. A specific program, say if children need to learn how to open their lunch boxes. So a short program over a few weeks targeting a specific skill …
So we are very disappointed as was our Early Intervention teacher who was also there. We currently have nearly 6 hours of our facilitated program twice a week. So that time has been halved just for starters let alone what the actual program is going to entail.
The constituent goes on to say:
Our meeting with KPMG where we advised of two to three consecutive days of 3-4 hours, with a specialist educator with children with similar developmental needs without parental or carer involvement whilst they attend these sessions, have resulted in nothing. These businesses should not be grouping together children that have Autism, Asperger’s, Global Development Delay or behavioural issues or other impairments. It would be disastrous for all of those children.
Why can we not have the choice of having our current Early Intervention programs and use the NDIS funding to pay for it? We have that option for our Therapists with Therapy ACT.
Again, our children are still caught in the middle of this mess. 3 years time it may be great, but that doesn’t help us now. So as per Joy Burch’s statement of “no child will be left behind” guess what …
Mr Assistant Speaker, I offer my full support to those providers who are willing to come to the ACT and set up shop. In fact, it is a daunting task for all disability service providers to change their way of thinking and step out of their comfort zone of doing what they know best and start operating in a new system much more like a corporate entity. This is a big step and one that is part of the changes that the NDIS is bringing to the disability sector; changes that, I might add, are supported wholeheartedly by the opposition in this place.
However, in this instance I feel the providers who have shown their willingness to step into the early intervention space are struggling. From discussions I have had with some of them, a common theme prevails. They have not been given enough time to navigate their way through the maze of paperwork and regulations. Again, I will draw on an example from one such service provider in an email sent to me just last week:
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