Can you deliver speech therapy inside an Australian school?
There is no national answer. Eight education departments run eight different gates, and two of them contradict each other outright. This is the comparison, written for the provider rather than the parent — with every line quoted from the department that published it, and the two states we could not establish marked as exactly that.
All four columns for all eight jurisdictions on one page, with the two we could not establish marked as unestablished.
The eight jurisdictions this site covers
- VIC
- QLD
- NSW
- WA
- SA
- TAS
- ACT — unestablished
- NT — unestablished
The founding fact
Every state agrees on one thing, and almost nothing else.
Queensland, Tasmania and South Australia each say it independently, and Western Australia says it in the negative: an NDIS provider has no automatic right to be on school grounds. Tasmania's wording is the plainest —
"NDIS providers do not have an automatic right to access schools to deliver NDIS supports." TAS S6 · Version 1.0, 12 May 2023
Queensland's fact sheet for providers says the same thing in almost the same words. S8
That is where the agreement stops. Who is allowed to ask, what insurance you must carry, which document you sign, and how long the principal has to answer are different in every jurisdiction that publishes them — and in two, nobody publishes them at all.
Queensland and Western Australia give opposite answers to the same question.
"NDIS providers cannot make requests for access directly to the school." QLD S8
"Providers can only make a direct request if they have the consent of the parent or carer." WA S10
Western Australia is the only jurisdiction we found that lets a provider approach the school directly. Queensland forbids exactly that. A provider who runs the WA playbook in Queensland has broken the process on step one — not at the end, at the beginning.
The four questions that actually differ
Who may ask · what insurance · which signed instrument · how long the decision takes. Four columns, eight jurisdictions, and the honest blanks left visible.
Read all eight on the comparison pageVictoria is the outlier in both directions at once.
Professional indemnity
$5,000,000
"no less than $5 million per any one event and in the aggregate" — higher than anywhere else we found. S3
Public liability
$10,000,000
"minimum sum per occurrence of $10 million" — lower than the $20 million QLD and TAS each require. S3
So a policy sized for a Queensland school is under-insured for Victoria's professional indemnity requirement and over-insured for its public liability one. There is no national minimum to size against, because there is no national rule.
What this does not cover
Every source on this site governs government schools. Catholic and independent systems set their own policies, and we did not read them — so nothing here should be assumed to apply to a diocesan or independent school. Ask that system directly.
If you work across a border, the difference between two states is the thing that actually costs you a term. The one-pager collects all four columns on a single sheet you can keep beside the phone — send me the eight-state sheet.
Every state's gate on one sheet
The four-column comparison, printed to keep beside the phone.
The four-column comparison, the two contradictions, and the jurisdictions nobody has published.
- 01 Who may make the request, per jurisdiction — and the two states that disagree
- 02 Professional indemnity and public liability minimums, with the blanks left blank
- 03 The signed instrument each department requires, and who signs it
…and 8 more, including the two published decision clocks and the jurisdictions we could not establish.
Get the one-pager