Submission
No 127
INQUIRY INTO FOUNDATIONAL AND DISABILITY
SUPPORTS AVAILABLE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG
PEOPLE IN NEW SOUTH WALES
Name: Georgia Nolan
Date Received: 18 September 2026
Submission to the Inquiry into Children and Young People with Disability in
New South Wales Educational Settings
From: Georgia Nolan, Occupational Therapist, Home Grown Connections OT
Re: Support for Recommendation 13 and the need for embedded, whole-school occupational therapy
I am an occupational therapist working in private practice with children, teenagers and young adults, many under NDIS funding, with a focus on nervous system regulation and sensory processing. I make this submission in support of Recommendation 13 and to add a clinical perspective to what OTA’s 2024 submission to this Inquiry already outlined.
What I am seeing in practice
A significant proportion of the “behaviour” that leads to reprimands, suspensions and informal exclusion from class is not defiance or a discipline problem — it is dysregulation. A child who is overwhelmed, over- or under-stimulated, or unable to interoceptively identify what they are feeling will communicate that through their body and behaviour, because they do not yet have another way to communicate it. When that behaviour is met with punishment rather than support, the child learns not that they need help regulating, but that they are “bad” — a belief that compounds over time and drives disengagement from school altogether, and places significant concerns on the development of their mental health. I am seeing this across multiple schools, multiple families, and multiple age groups. This is not a marginal issue: students with disability accounted for almost 48% of all students suspended in NSW government schools in 2023.¹
Teachers are rarely trained in nervous system regulation or sensory processing, and parents often are not either — this is an occupational therapist’s specific skill set. Both are left to manage escalating behaviour reactively, with no shared language or framework for what is actually happening for the child. This is not a gap that can be closed by goodwill or by upskilling parents or teachers alone — it requires professional expertise embedded where the behaviour occurs: in the classroom, during the school day.
I am also seeing children being pushed into formal curriculum delivery earlier and with less flexibility, at the expense of play-based and experiential learning — particularly in the early years, where play is not a break from learning but the primary way young children regulate, build sensory-motor foundations, and develop social and emotional skills. This is well established in the research: early self-regulation predicts academic performance through elementary school and wellbeing outcomes into adulthood, and children engaged in self-directed play have been shown to develop stronger executive function, self-regulation and literacy gains than peers in more didactic classrooms.² Removing play in favour of earlier academic instruction disadvantages children who are already struggling to self-regulate, and increases the likelihood that their needs present as behavioural rather than developmental.
On a school visit I completed this year, I observed a Kindergarten teacher teaching students with the curriculum listed on the board, in dot point form, kindergarten. Myself, as a well-educated adult, did not understand what I was reading. Imagine being in kindergarten. This is an example of failure of many systems — teachers being taught and bound by strict and unreasonable expectations of class delivery, and students being failed by these teachers. I was there to observe one child because she doesn’t want to go to school. Not one of the kids in this classroom was “sitting still” or “engaged.” I wonder why?
Why nervous system regulation needs to be taught to everyone
A regulated classroom depends on regulated adults. Nervous system regulation is not a niche clinical skill for children who “need extra support” — it is a foundational human skill that affects how anyone, adult or child, learns, connects and copes under stress. When only the child is expected to “manage their behaviour,” while the adults around them (teachers, parents) have no framework for their own regulation, the system is asking the least-resourced person in the room to do the most work.
Children co-regulate through the adults around them before they can self-regulate independently. A teacher who understands their own stress response, and has language and tools for regulating in the moment, is far better placed to help a dysregulated child than one relying on instinct or discipline alone. The same is true for parents, who are often managing their own overwhelm — financial stress, work, and the emotional load of advocating for their child — while being asked to be their child’s primary regulation support with no training and no backup.
Teaching nervous system regulation universally — to whole staff cohorts, to whole classes, and to parent communities, not just to identified children — changes the culture of a school rather than adding another individual intervention. It also removes stigma: when regulation is taught as something everyone needs and everyone has, a child who is struggling is no longer the “odd one out” needing to be fixed; they are a member of a community that already has a shared language for what they’re experiencing.
This is also where community matters, not just training. Parents raising neurodivergent children are frequently isolated, exhausted, and carrying the belief that they are failing. Teachers managing large, diverse classrooms without adequate support often feel the same. Offering parents and teachers spaces to connect with others facing the same challenges — not just information, but genuine community and peer support — builds resilience and regulation capacity in the adults, which flows directly back to the children they are responsible for. A regulated, supported adult community is one of the most powerful and under-used protective factors available in this system, and it costs far less than crisis response after a child has already been excluded from school.
What needs to change
I support OTA’s recommendation that the NSW Government fund the direct employment of occupational therapists within the Department of Education, in well resourced multidisciplinary regional teams. I would add the following, based on what I see is missing at ground level:
- Whole-school and whole-class OT input, not only 1:1. OTs working in schools should be resourced to run whole-class programs on emotional regulation and sensory awareness (e.g. Zones of Regulation-style frameworks, interoception education), not only individual funded students. This builds a shared language across a class and reduces the number of children who reach crisis before support is identified. It also supports the quiet kids — the ones who mask, become the teachers’ pets, the ones who go unnoticed. A 2023 scoping review of school-based occupational therapy found that when educators were trained alongside OT involvement, their readiness to engage with and accept OT support in the classroom improved significantly — but also found that no study to date has evaluated a genuine whole-school model.³ NSW has the opportunity to lead here, not just replicate what limited evidence already exists.
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Staff training as a core function. Teachers and school staff need practical, ongoing training in recognising dysregulation, sensory processing differences, and co-regulation strategies — not a single PD day, but embedded coaching from an OT who knows the specific children and classroom.
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Reduced staff-to-student ratios or additional in-class support. With rising rates of identified neurodivergence, a 1:20 (or higher) teacher-to-student ratio makes individualised regulation support structurally impossible, regardless of how well trained a teacher is. NSW Department of Education modelling projects that the proportion of students receiving Level 1 autism funding will rise from 2.0% in 2019 to 3.5% by 2028, and a NSW population data-linkage study found autism prevalence at age 6 increasing by an average of 4.1% per year.⁴ Co-teaching models, additional in-class support staff, and — for students with the highest support needs — smaller class sizes, need to be part of the funded response. The evidence on class size specifically is more consistent for students with disability than for general education, where effects are mixed.⁵ This is a resourcing issue, not a competency issue, and it should not be left for individual schools or teachers to solve.
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Parent/carer training and partnership. Parents are currently expected to become de facto specialists, translating strategies from private therapy into a school context they have no authority over. Embedded school OTs can build consistency between home and school and reduce the burden currently sitting entirely with families.
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Protection of play-based learning in the early years. Curriculum design and school readiness expectations should be reviewed with allied health input to ensure young children are not being pushed into formal instruction ahead of the developmental regulation and sensory foundations play provides.
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Reconsidering technology use in classrooms. Increased screen and device use in classrooms can add to sensory load and contribute to dysregulation, particularly for children who are already struggling to filter and process sensory input. Research has linked screen habits to differences in children’s sensory profiles, and Australian and UK guidance for schools notes that excessive solo screen use can crowd out the sleep, physical activity, play and adult interaction that support attention and self-regulation.⁶ Reducing unnecessary technology use, and being deliberate about when and how it’s introduced, supports attention, engagement and regulation — and allows more room for the play-based, embodied learning
that already needs protecting in the early years. Technology should be a considered tool, not a default, particularly where it is being used to manage a classroom rather than to teach.
- Local workforce pipeline. Any funding commitment must also address where the workforce comes from. The University of Wollongong does not have an occupational therapy department and does not teach OT, meaning there is no local training pathway for the Illawarra region. Without a regional pipeline, embedding OTs in local schools will be constrained by workforce availability regardless of funding — this is a structural gap the Government needs to address alongside Recommendation 13.
In practice
The Person-Environment-Occupation (PEO) model is core to how occupational therapists understand behaviour: participation and “flow” happen when there is a good fit between a person, their environment, and the occupation (in this case, learning) they’re trying to engage in. When that fit is poor — an overwhelmed nervous system, a sensory-dysregulating environment, a task pitched beyond current capacity — behaviour is the visible sign of the misfit, not a character flaw to correct. This is why the child is not the problem to fix in isolation; the environment and the demands placed on them need to be adjusted alongside any support given to the child.
In my own work, when a child, their teacher and their parent all understand the same framework for regulation and sensory need, the pattern of escalating “problem behaviour” changes quickly — often faster than when a child works with an outside therapist alone, because the strategies are being applied consistently in the environment where the difficulty is actually occurring. Improving that person environment fit at school, rather than only working on the child in a clinic room removed from where the difficulty happens, is what actually restores a child’s sense of flow and belonging in the classroom. This mirrors the case study in OTA’s submission of a school-based OT working with a small student group: the intervention was faster, cheaper and more sustainable than equivalent outside therapy, because it was embedded where the need was.
“Bad kids” are children whose nervous systems are overwhelmed in an environment that has not been resourced to support them. This is a solvable, well-evidenced problem. I urge the Committee to recommend that Recommendation 13 be funded, and
that occupational therapy be embedded as a core, whole-school resource — not an individual add-on — across NSW schools.
References
- Tait, K. & Hyde, M. (2025). “Suspension and Exclusion Rates From Schools in Most
Australian States Are Skyrocketing. Are We Now Inclusive or Exclusive?“ InSpEd
Insights, September 2025. (Note: the 48% NSW disability-suspension figure they report is itself drawn from Graham, L.J., Killingly, C., Laurens, K.R., & Sweller, N. (2023) and Miller, S.M. (2022) — worth citing those as the primary sources if you want maximum rigour.)
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Moffitt, T.E. et al. (2011), cited in Free play predicts self-regulation years later: Longitudinal evidence from a large Australian sample of toddlers and preschoolers, ScienceDirect; Allee-Herndon, K.A. et al. (2022). “Let’s talk play! Exploring the possible benefits of play-based pedagogy on language and literacy learning in two Title I kindergarten classrooms.” Early Childhood Education Journal, 50(1), 119–132.
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Lynch, H., Moore, A., O’Connor, D., & Boyle, B. (2023). “Evidence for implementing tiered approaches in school-based occupational therapy in elementary schools: A scoping review.” American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 77(1), 7701205110.
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NSW Department of Education (2020). Understanding increased enrolments of autism and mental health needs in NSW government schools; Nielsen, T.C. et al. (2024). “Estimating the Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder in New South Wales, Australia.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 54(4), 1558– 1566.
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Bondebjerg, A., Dalgaard, N.T., Filges, T., & Viinholt, B.C.A. (2023). “The effects of small class sizes on students’ academic achievement, socioemotional development and well-being in special education: A systematic review.” Campbell Systematic Reviews, 19(3).
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Nature/Pediatric Research (2025). “Screen habits and effects on sensory profiles in 6- to 36-month-old toddlers”; Best Start in Life screen-time guidance for schools (UK Early Years Screen Time Advisory Group).
If you have any questions regarding the above information, please feel free to contact me via email or telephone.
Warm regards,