On 1 June 2026, the Fair Work Commission published its Decision and Draft Determination following a review into gender undervaluation of the SCHADS Award.  For those of us in the disability advocacy sector, this matters because this is the main award that advocates are employed under.  A lot of our workforce does the kind of relational, high-skill, high-judgement work that has historically been hard to capture in a pay classification, and this review was, in part, an attempt to fix that.

 

Here’s what CEOs and organisational leaders need to know.

 

 

Back in 2022-23, the Fair Work Commission found that a number of Awards — including SCHADS — had likely undervalued workers because the work itself, much of it done by women, wasn’t being properly recognised or classified. Following a similar decision for the Aged Care Award in March 2024, the Commission began reviewing SCHADS in early 2025. The aim was twofold: acknowledge that the Award had undervalued relevant skills, and simplify the tangle of different Schedules into one clearer structure.

 

 

DANA made two submissions during this process, in October 2025 and February 2026. 

 

Our key positions were:

 

 

 

A new classification: “Caseworker/Practitioner.”: This role is now explicitly recognised in the Award as involving distinctive skills; work that assists or advocates for marginalised or vulnerable people, groups or communities, and that combines high-level interpersonal skills with high-level knowledge work. This is a meaningful shift: it names and values exactly the kind of work many advocates do every day.

 

Lived experience is now explicitly recognised:  The Award now states that lived experience can be considered alongside industry experience and formal qualifications when assessing the overall skill set required for a role.

 

Levels are being renumbered: not restructured in a way that should cause confusion:

 

 Pay rates are, for most people, largely unchanged:  This is because the pay increases delivered through the 2012 Equal Remuneration Order have now been built directly into the Award itself, rather than sitting alongside it. There are minor pay rate reductions at current levels 4.2 and 4.3 (new levels 6.3 and 6.4), but anyone currently employed at those levels keeps their existing rate, including if they change employers.

 

 

There is no need to panic, and there is no need to act immediately.  The new Award doesn’t commence until 1 October 2027, giving the sector well over a year to plan. 

 

Some Schedule E changes start earlier, but these shouldn’t directly affect most advocacy organisations. Schedule E covers Home Care and Disability Services workers,  the classification under which most disability support workers working with NDIS participants are employed. 

 

We know there’s been some concern in the sector about what this might mean for NDIS plan budgets, so DANA has checked the detail: the NDIA Pricing Guides and the Disability Support Worker Cost Model for 2026-27 both appear to accommodate the proposed Schedule E changes, alongside the Annual Wage Review 2026-27. 

 

On that basis, we don’t expect these changes to have an adverse impact on NDIS plan budgets in the short term.

 

 

  

 

We’ll continue monitoring FWC advice, including the final Award text when published, and investigating exactly how the retained-rate protections apply for people moving roles within the new Level 6. We’ll also be tracking any downstream impacts and keeping members updated as things develop.

 

If you have questions about how this might apply to your organisation, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the DANA policy team: policy@dana.org.au