Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

In addition to the additional $1.2 billion of long-term school funding that we announced yesterday, we are also delivering in this year's budget additional support for students with a disability to the tune of $118 million in extra funding for this school year—2016—and next year, in 2017.

This will be the first-ever funding that is allocated and informed by the nationally-consistent collection of data on students with a disability. It will be the first time ever that we are distributing funding according to this model that identifies students and their particular level of adjustment. It takes our support for students with a disability to a record level of $5.3 billion over the period 2014 to 2017, far exceeding the previous government's unfunded promises. It is actually using the data collection methodology that is there, but we will also make sure that we increase the robustness of that methodology so that it can truly drive funding for students with a disability from new formulas from 2018 onwards.