The year after school ends is where a lot of young people with disability quietly fall off a cliff. The structure disappears, the friends scatter, and the plan is often nothing more than a hope that something turns up. School Leaver Employment Support exists to fill that gap, and the families who get the most out of it are the ones who start asking early.
What SLES is for
School Leaver Employment Support, usually shortened to SLES, is NDIS funded support that helps a young person move from school into work. It sits in the capacity building part of a plan, under the goal of finding and keeping a job.
The point is not to place someone in a job on day one. It is to build the things that make a job survivable: turning up on time, getting there independently, understanding a payslip, asking a supervisor a question, coping when a shift changes, knowing what to do when something goes wrong.
Those are the skills that decide whether a first job lasts three weeks or three years, and school does not usually teach them.
Who it is for
Broadly, SLES is for young people with disability who are in their final year of school or have recently left, and who need support to get ready for open employment. In practice that tends to mean people in their late teens and very early twenties.
It suits someone who wants to work but is not job ready yet. If a young person already has the skills and simply needs help finding a role, a different service is usually the better fit. If they are years away from any kind of work, other capacity building supports may come first.
Eligibility depends on the person's goals and circumstances, and it has to be funded in their plan, so the honest answer to "do I qualify" is that it depends on what the plan says and what you ask for.
What it actually looks like week to week
SLES varies a lot between providers, which is worth knowing before you choose one. A well run program usually includes some mix of:
- Work experience in real workplaces, not simulated ones.
- Travel training, so the young person can get to work without a parent driving them. This single item is often the difference between a job being possible and impossible.
- Job readiness: resumes, applications, interview practice, what to wear, what to say.
- Workplace communication: asking for help, taking direction, handling a mistake, dealing with a difficult colleague.
- Money skills: pay, tax, budgeting, what superannuation is.
- Time and routine: alarms, planning a week, managing fatigue.
Support usually runs over a period of up to about two years, which is deliberately long. Employment readiness is not a course you complete, it is a set of habits that take time.
How SLES differs from Disability Employment Services
This confuses almost everyone, so it is worth separating clearly.
SLES is NDIS funded and is about getting ready for work. It is capacity building, and it is delivered by NDIS providers.
Disability Employment Services, or DES, is a separate Australian Government program, not part of the NDIS. DES is about finding and keeping a job: employer contact, placement, and on the job support once someone is working.
They are not competitors and many young people use both, often moving from SLES into DES as they become job ready. A good SLES provider will tell you when it is time to make that transition rather than holding on to you.
When to start asking
Earlier than most families do. The best time to raise employment goals is at the planning meeting before the final year of school, not after the young person has already left.
There are two reasons. First, funding follows goals: if nobody wrote an employment goal into the plan, there is nothing for SLES to attach to. Second, the months right after school finishes are when momentum is easiest to lose, and a program that starts in March after a summer of nothing is starting uphill.
At the planning meeting, be specific. Not "we would like him to have something to do", but "she wants to work in a childcare centre, she needs to learn to catch two buses on her own, and she has never had a job interview". Our guide to preparing for your NDIS plan review covers how to put that case together with evidence.
What to ask a SLES provider
The quality gap between programs is wide, so ask directly:
- What does a typical week look like, and how much of it is in a real workplace?
- What kinds of jobs have your participants actually moved into?
- Do you do travel training, and how far do you take it?
- What is the ratio of staff to participants?
- What happens when someone is ready for open employment, and do you help them move to DES?
- How do you work with families, and how often will we hear from you?
Be cautious of a program that is mostly centre based activities with a job readiness label on it. Real work experience is harder to organise and much more useful.
For families in South West Sydney
There is a particular version of this conversation that comes up often around Liverpool and Fairfield. In many families, a young person with disability is expected to stay home, and the idea of them working is treated as unrealistic or as something the family would be judged for.
That expectation usually comes from love and from having been let down before. It is still worth testing. Plenty of young people we work with have surprised everyone, including themselves, and a first payslip changes how a whole family sees what is possible.
Our School Leaver Employment Support program works with young people across South West Sydney, and our youth services team supports the broader part of this age group where employment is not the immediate goal yet.
Where to start
If someone in your family is in year 11 or 12, or has left school in the last couple of years, the useful next step is a conversation about goals before the next plan is written.
Call our Liverpool team and we will walk you through what to ask for, what SLES can realistically do, and whether it is the right fit. If it is not, we will point you to what is.
Ready to take the next step?
Our Liverpool team is here to listen and help, in your language, at your pace.
