Part 1 of a four-part series: Making FY 26-27 Different
Last week, I asked what your disability inclusion spending actually delivered this year. Today’s question is sharper: if your Disability Inclusion Action Plan has been operating across the last twelve months, you should be able to produce three specific numbers without scrambling for them.
Most organisations cannot.
That isn’t a small thing. The absence of these three numbers is the most reliable diagnostic I know for whether a DIAP is functioning as a strategy or sitting on a shared drive as a document. And the new financial year is the right moment to ask the question — while there’s still time to set up FY 26-27 to produce different answers.
Number one: How many actions in the plan have actually been completed?
Every DIAP contains a list of actions. The action plan is usually the longest section of the document. It outlines what the organisation will do across the planning period — initiatives, projects, system changes, partnerships, training, audits, and reporting commitments.
The first number a working DIAP should produce is the completion rate. Of all the actions committed to for this financial year, what percentage have been completed? Not started, not progressed, not on track. Completed.
This is not a trick question. A DIAP that committed to 10 actions this year and completed 8 has a clear story: 80% completion; here’s what was delivered; here’s why 2 actions didn’t land. That’s accountability.
A DIAP whose owner can’t tell you the completion rate has a different story: nobody has been tracking. Without tracking, the actions exist only on paper, not in practice. They were written down, signed off, communicated externally — and then quietly forgotten as the year unfolded and other priorities took over.
The honest test: ask whoever owns the DIAP in your organisation what the completion rate is for FY 25-26. If they need to go away and check, the DIAP isn’t operating as a live document. It’s been a static one.
Number two: how many staff and stakeholders engaged with the plan?
The second number is harder to define cleanly, but more important. It speaks to whether the DIAP exists as an organisational reality or only as a document at the top of the inclusion lead’s email signature.
Specifically: across the financial year, how many people inside the organisation could be expected to know that the DIAP exists, know roughly what it commits to, and know what their role in delivering it is? And how many people outside the organisation — community members, disability sector stakeholders, lived experience contributors — engaged with the plan in some structured way?
This is the integration number. It tells you whether the DIAP has become part of how the organisation operates, or whether it has remained the responsibility of one or two people.
A DIAP that fewer than 20% of relevant staff know about isn’t being implemented. It’s being held. By somebody, somewhere, but not by the organisation. When that person leaves, takes parental leave, gets unwell, or moves to another role, the DIAP falls with them. The work resets. The plan starts again from scratch under a new owner who has to rediscover what’s already been documented.
A DIAP that is genuinely operational shows up in onboarding, in performance reviews, in team meeting agendas, in procurement decisions, in service design conversations, and in budget planning. People know it exists. People know what it commits to. People know what their part is. That’s what integration looks like.
If you can’t quantify integration even loosely, the DIAP is not yet a live strategy in your organisation.
Number three: What specifically changed for disabled people because of the plan?
The third number is the hardest, the most important, and the one that most organisations cannot produce in any meaningful form.
What outcomes did the DIAP achieve for disabled people across the financial year? Not actions completed. Not training delivered. No consultations held. Outcomes. Changes that disabled people would consider meaningful.
These could be quantitative: a percentage increase in disabled visitors, customers, staff, members, or participants. A reduction in complaints or barriers reported. An increase in retention or progression rates for disabled staff. A measurable improvement in accessibility scores against an external standard. Specific, countable, traceable to the DIAP’s actions.
Or they could be qualitative but specific: a documented policy change that opened access to a previously closed service. A specific community partnership that produced a defined collaboration. A specific accessibility upgrade used by people who couldn’t access the space before. A specific employment pathway that has enabled disabled people to be recruited, retained, or promoted.
Most DIAPs cannot answer this question because the link between actions and outcomes was never set up to be traceable. The actions committed to were activities, not outcome targets. The reporting structures didn’t include outcome data. The lived experience contributors who could have validated whether the changes mattered were paid for their participation but were not engaged in the evaluation.
Without outcome data, the DIAP cannot demonstrate that it changed anything. The work happened. The activity reports are clean. But what specifically shifted for disabled people remains unclear.
What does it mean if you can’t produce these numbers
If your organisation cannot produce any of these three numbers for FY 25-26, the DIAP has been a decorative document rather than an operational plan. That’s not a moral failure. It is a structural one — and a fixable one. But it needs to be named honestly before it can be addressed.
If your organisation can produce one of the three but not the others, you have partial implementation. You know what was done (action completion), or you know who engaged (integration), or you know what changed (outcomes) — but you don’t have the full picture. That’s also a fixable problem, but the fix depends on which number is missing.
If your organisation can produce all three with confidence, you have a DIAP that has been operating as a strategy. That’s still rare. If you’re in that position, the question for FY 26-27 isn’t whether the plan is working but whether you’re committing to outcomes ambitious enough for the next planning cycle.
Setting up FY 26-27 to produce these numbers
The point of asking these questions now is not retrospective accountability. It is forward planning. The structures that will determine whether your organisation can produce these three numbers next year are the structures you put in place during this quarter’s planning conversations.
Action completion tracking requires that the DIAP’s action plan has an owner for each action, a quarterly check-in cadence, and a reporting mechanism into existing organisational reporting structures. Most DIAPs don’t have these. They get launched, then aren’t structured for ongoing tracking. The fix is built into the action plan, not added later as a separate exercise.
Integration tracking requires that the DIAP appear in operational documents that staff actually use — position descriptions, onboarding materials, procurement guidelines, team performance plans, and budget templates. Most DIAPs don’t show up in these documents. The fix is to incorporate the DIAP into operational infrastructure at the planning stage, rather than hoping staff will read the standalone plan.
Outcome tracking requires that the DIAP commit to specific outcome targets, not just action targets, and that lived experience contributors are involved in evaluation, not only in initial consultation. Most DIAPs commit to actions and call it a strategy. The fix is setting outcome indicators alongside actions, with reporting structures that capture both.
None of these is an easy fix. All of them are structural. All of them have to happen during the planning stage, not after the plan is published.
A question for this week
If you’re in FY 26-27 planning conversations right now — and many organisations are — there is one question worth raising that will shape whether you can produce these three numbers next year.
Who owns the answer? Not the action. Not the activity. The answer to: did this work, and how do we know?
If the answer is the inclusion lead alone, the DIAP will be held by one person again next year, and the same three numbers will be unanswerable this time next June. If the answer is finance, governance, executive, and operations collectively — and the structures are set up to make that collective answer possible — then FY 26-27 has a chance of being different.
Next week: what a board should ask before signing off FY 26-27 inclusion plans.
Work With Me
This is part of the Making Inclusion Work series, written for leaders and practitioners who want their inclusion work to actually stick. If you’re thinking about your next phase of inclusion work — a DIAP, a strategy refresh, an audit, or a governance piece — and you’d like a confidential conversation about where you’re sitting and what would genuinely move you forward, I’d welcome the chat.
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