NDIA Accountability Project

Submission 263 — United Workers Union — Inquiry into the Thriving Kids initiative

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Submission of the United Workers Union

To the Standing Committee on Health Aged Care and Disability inquiry into the Thriving Kids Initiative

3 October 2025

For more information about this submission please contact Melissa Coad at redacted

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Acknowledgement to Country

The United Workers’ Union is a national trade union. We acknowledge and respect the continuing spirit, culture and contribution of Traditional Custodians on the lands where we work, and pay respects to Elders – past, present and emerging. We extend our respects to Traditional Custodians of all the places that United Workers’ Union members live and work around the country.

About UWU

The United Workers Union (UWU) is a union built from the strength of over 150,000 workers across Australia. Our members are on the frontline of caring for children, supporting people with disability, and ensuring that schools and early childhood education services can include every child.

UWU represents workers across disability services, schools and early childhood education. Our members include Education Assistants (EAs), Special Needs Education Assistants (SNEAs), Teacher Aides (TAs), Disability Support Workers and Early Childhood Educators. They are the people who every day hold together a system that has become fragmented, inequitable and overly dependent on private provision.

Introduction

When the NDIS was introduced, it was assumed that state disability services would reduce gradually, while the NDIS expanded to fill gaps. In practice, state governments withdrew more quickly and more completely than expected. Schools and Early Childhood Education (ECEC) became the default safety net. It was education support staff, early childhood educators and teachers who picked up the slack, supporting students whose therapies had disappeared, parents who had no coordination, and classrooms that had to absorb students with high needs and no additional resources.

As one WA Education Assistant told us: “We used to have layers of help. A support coordinator, local services, people you could call if you were worried about a kid even if they weren’t funded. After the NDIS, that all vanished. Now it’s just me and the teacher.”

The ECIA National Guidelines for Best Practice in Early Childhood Intervention (2016) make clear that children thrive when supports are embedded in their everyday environments; the places they live, learn and play. For young children, this means ECEC services and schools. These guidelines emphasise:

  • Supports should be delivered in natural settings, where children already spend time.
  • Collaboration across services is essential, with parents, teachers, assistants and therapists working together.
  • Outcomes are maximised when interventions are integrated into daily routines and relationships.

These are exactly the conditions that schools and ECEC can provide, in strong contrast to the NDIS’s individual intervention approach. Thriving Kids offers the chance to build a system that is consistent with best practice and draws on existing workforce strengths.

This submission is in two parts. The first addressing the issues and opportunities in public schools and the second in Early Childhood Education and Care.

PART 1 – Public Schools

The Problems

Fragmentation and inequity

Australia’s current system of disability support for children is fragmented, inequitable and overly dependent on private provision. Families are required to juggle multiple providers, each with separate processes and paperwork.

Access to services too often depends on a formal diagnosis. This delays intervention, forces families into medicalised pathways, and excludes children unable to secure a diagnosis. The outcome is deeply inequitable: families with the resources to pay for assessments or navigate complex systems receive support, while low-income, regional, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, and culturally and linguistically diverse families face disproportionate barriers.

One EA described the impact:

“I work in an area with a lot of migrant families. Parents will often wait until they’ve got permanent residency before they seek a diagnosis, because they’re afraid it will affect their Visa. That means by the time we get support, the child has missed years.”

Case Study: Prep Student without Diagnosis

A prep student first enrolled at school without a formal diagnosis. One teacher aide (TA) was rostered to work with them. The TA received no training and was not involved in planning for the student.

They were given no information about triggers or strategies. Within a month, the student was withdrawn from school.

The child later returned with a diagnosis of Autism. Their timetable was restricted to just two hours a day, four days a week, with a plan to gradually increase time in class over Term 4. Six different outside specialists worked with the student at school.

Two TAs were rostered alongside these specialists, essentially shadowing them while the student transitioned back into school. The TAs were invited into meetings about the students’ plan, but never asked for input, despite being the people who spent the most time with the child. No formal training was provided to the TAs on managing violent behaviours, developmental needs, manual handling, or trigger management.

Ultimately, one TA was required to be with the student 100% of the time they were in attendance. This meant the students’ support depended entirely on the presence of the TA, without the proper training, recognition, or authority to influence the plan.

This case shows how fragmented services are. Multiple outside providers move in and out of schools, but the people who spend the most time with the student, Education Support staff, are sidelined. Instead of building a stable, skilled workforce within schools, the system outsources to private services, creating duplication and gaps. The result is inconsistency, delay, and the loss of the very relationships that make the biggest difference to a child’s learning and safety.

The burden on schools and staff

When state services were withdrawn, schools became the default delivery point for children whose needs did not fit neatly into the NDIS. Education Support Staff were the ones who filled the gap.

Case Study: Stepping into the Gap

Before the NDIS, a specialist speech pathologist visited a regional primary school once a week, working with multiple students and training EAs in how to reinforce strategies. After the transition, that service was withdrawn. An EA in the same school explained:

“Now these students are nearly all in Macqlit [literacy intervention programs run by EAs]. But that isn’t all they need. Some of them get NDIS, but now the parents are asking if we can do tele-health. If I’m in tele-health with one student – I’m not spending time with all the other kids. It’s extra work, but the parents are desperate because the providers only offer work hours sessions.”

Another EA put it more bluntly:

“The kids we work with used to get help outside of school. Now some do and some don’t and we’re left to try and piece it all together and cover the gaps. We’ve picked up a lot from the plans we do see and the training we do get. But our pay and training haven’t changed.”

The result is that schools are now carrying responsibility for disability inclusion without the mandate, funding or systemic support to do so.

Disconnected plans and unsafe environments

The separation of education and therapy systems creates duplication and gaps. Many therapy goals are directly related to education; communication, behaviour, social participation, yet schools often have no visibility of them. Parents are left to act as the conduit between two systems.

Case Study: Student with Three Funded Therapies

A Year Three student with significant additional needs is enrolled at the school with a diagnosis of Autism and is on medication. Despite this, the student is rarely present in the classroom. Instead, the student’s “learning” is reduced to workbooks handed to the Teacher Aide (TA) to manage outside of class. The student shadows the TA around the school, in the library, on the playground, even through lunch breaks, with little structured learning taking place.

The student has funded therapies through external providers, yet these are not integrated into the school. The therapies are delivered elsewhere, with no clear connection between what is recommended and what happens in the classroom. As a result, the strategies that should support the student’s learning and behaviour are not applied in a consistent or coordinated way.

One TA described the situation plainly:

“Unless you have constant connection with the student and consistency, the student does not engage nor feel comfortable to learn.”

Despite being the only person with continuous, day-to-day contact with the student, the TA has received no formal or informal training; not in face-to-face sessions, and not even through online modules. They were not included in the development of the students’ plan and were never asked for feedback on what works in practice.

This case study shows how schools are missing the opportunity to integrate external, funded supports into a child’s actual education. The people with the most contact with the student, TAs, are

excluded from planning and left untrained, even as they provide near-constant support. The result is that students with high needs remain isolated from the classroom, with their education reduced to worksheets, and their funded therapies never fully leveraged in the place where they spend most of their day.

Opportunities for Thriving Kids

The problems are serious, but the opportunities are equally clear. Australia already has the workforce and settings needed to deliver inclusive, integrated support. What is missing is systemic recognition, resourcing and alignment.

Case Study: Early Intervention Preschools in WA

Western Australia’s Early Intervention Programs, such as Kenwick School, show how education and therapy can be brought together. These programs integrate therapists, teachers, EAs and families to support children aged 0–4 with developmental delay or disability, preparing them for mainstream school.

This is exactly the model described in the ECIA National Guidelines: family-centred, collaborative, outcomes-focused, and embedded in everyday environments.

Thriving Kids should extend this model nationally, ensuring that schools and ECEC are resourced to play the role they are already playing by default.

At the preschool it all happens in the one place. If a kid needs speech or OT, the therapist is right there with us. I watch what they do, then carry it through the day, in class, in the playground, even at lunch. The kids get the same message all the time, and that’s when it sticks.

You can’t teach emotional regulation in a clinic room. You teach it when another kid knocks over their block tower and they’re about to lose it. That’s when I can step in and use the same strategies the therapist showed me.

With NDIS, families are juggling heaps of providers, and no one talks to each other. Here, we’re all one team. The child’s not bouncing between services — they’re supported right where they learn, by people who actually know them.

Thriving Kids should expand standalone early intervention programs and integrate those same supports directly into schools and early childhood centres. That’s how we get the same impact for every child, not just the few who end up in specialist programs.

School support staff and ECEC workers see this every day. The skills they build supporting students with additional needs, helping with communication, behaviour, and emotional regulation, benefit every child in the classroom. When those supports are embedded, not outsourced, the whole cohort lifts.

Education Support Staff: Delivering Proven Interventions at Scale

Education Support staff are already running interventions that are structured and scripted to great effect. These models take the best research-backed approaches, systematise them, and allow them to be delivered at scale by people known to the student. It is both more efficient and more effective and gets frontline help to the people who need it most.

Literacy and Numeracy

Evidence from Australia shows that Education Assistants and Teacher Aides, when supported with structured programs, can deliver significant improvements in student learning. Evaluations of MultiLit (NSW CESE) and QuickSmart Numeracy (E4L overview; NSW CESE evaluation) show that targeted students make meaningful gains in reading and mathematics when support staff run short, frequent sessions using pre-programmed materials under teacher guidance. The GRIN program (Victoria University) demonstrates how paraprofessionals working alongside teachers to deliver small-group numeracy interventions can achieve strong outcomes. These programs show that, with training and structure, Education Support staff are capable of driving measurable improvements in core skills.

Emotional Regulation and Life Skills

Education Support staff also play a powerful role in delivering social and emotional learning (SEL) and self-regulation interventions. Research in NSW schools has shown positive associations between SEL programs and student functioning across multiple domains, while Australasian reviews confirm that small-group SEL focused on emotional regulation, peer relations, and behaviour yields meaningful gains when staff are trained and delivery is consistent. South Australian evaluations highlight that embedding SEL into everyday school routines reduces distress and classroom disruption. Programs like the Zones of Regulation are already widely used, with evaluations showing improved emotional awareness and regulation, while additional resources such as KooLKIDS and Mindfields offer classroom-ready SEL curricula that can be facilitated by support staff. International meta-analysis reinforces these findings, showing that well-implemented school-based SEL improves academic performance, behaviour, and wellbeing.

These findings reinforce that SEL works best when integrated into everyday school settings; so that regulation and life skills are practiced in real time, not confined to isolated “counselling sessions.” The fact that education support staff already spend the most time with vulnerable students makes them ideal deliverers of SEL content when properly trained and structured.

Building Thriving Kids on a Proven Model

Thriving Kids should be based on this model: take the best interventions, systematise them, and place them in the hands of the existing workforce to deliver at scale. This ensures efficiency, integration, and reach, while maintaining continuity with the people children already know. Some children will still require one-to-one interventions, but these should be assessed against the kinds of commonly agreed and easy-to-measure benchmarks that already underpin programs like MultiLit, QuickSmart and Zones of Regulation. The evidence is clear: Education Support staff, properly trained and supported, are already delivering critical interventions and with the right training and support are ready to do more.

Integrated Planning Frameworks

Thriving Kids should mandate a single integrated planning framework shared between mainstream settings and providers. Every child should have one plan that combines education, therapy and behaviour strategies, with input from teachers, education support staff, therapists, coordinators and families.

At present, children often sit at the centre of multiple, disconnected plans. Each is well-intentioned, but without integration the result is duplication, gaps, and confusion. Parents are often left to act as the coordinator between systems that should be working together.

Case Study: Too Many Plans, Not Enough Integration

One student in a metropolitan Perth primary school currently sits at the centre of four different plans and interventions:

  • An Individual Education Plan (IEP) developed with the school psychologist and teacher, implemented daily by the EA.
  • A Behaviour Management Plan designed with the Behaviour Support Coordinator, teacher, parent and EA.
  • Two separate therapy plans from each of the student’s funded NDIS therapists.

Each plan adds value, but none are integrated. Teachers and EAs must decide which to prioritise. Parents are expected to interpret therapy reports, align them with classroom practice, and track outcomes.

As the students’ EA described:

“I’m implementing the IEP, and I’m also keeping their literacy intervention records. But the speech pathologist emails the parent directly, and I don’t see the plan. The OT talks to the parent too, and sometimes I hear about it weeks later. The parent is exhausted trying to make sense of it all.”

This is exactly the type of fragmentation the ECIA National Guidelines warn against. Thriving Kids should require a single, integrated plan that:

  • Align education, therapy and behaviour goals.
  • Provides role clarity for all professionals involved.
  • Is co-produced and reviewed jointly.
  • Reduces reliance on parents as system coordinators.

Such a framework would improve outcomes for children, provide clarity for staff, and relieve families of the impossible burden of managing multiple disconnected systems.

The Workforce at the Centre

Thriving Kids cannot succeed without the workforce. Reform will fail unless Education Support staff and Early Childhood Educators are fully integrated, resourced and recognised as a central part of the model.

Education Assistants and Teacher Aides spend up to 32 hours every week directly supporting students with disability. No other part of the system; not NDIS therapists, not private providers, not even teachers or psychologists, delivers this much consistent, hands-on intervention. They are the most stable, consistent and scalable part of Australia’s disability support system for children. Yet these workers remain undervalued, underpaid and excluded from professional learning. Their skills are under-recognised, and their training fragmented. This is not a workforce waiting to be built; it already exists, is committed to the students, and is already doing the work. The problem is not workforce will. It is workforce recognition and support.

As one EA told us:

“We’re with these students every day, all day. We’re the ones carrying out the plans, helping them through meltdowns, keeping them included. But the plans are written without us, the training goes elsewhere, and the pay doesn’t match the responsibility.”

Thriving Kids must:

  • Provide ongoing, embedded training for education support staff in inclusive pedagogy, behaviour support, and child development.
  • Ensure they are included as equal contributors in integrated planning frameworks.
  • Recognise the support they already deliver as the foundation of the system.
  • Pay them fairly for the complexity and value of this work.

Without this, reform will continue to rely on goodwill rather than a sustainable workforce.

Avoiding the Mistakes of the NDIS: Private Provision is Not the Answer

Thriving Kids must learn the lessons of the NDIS. The over-reliance on private provision has created fragmentation, inequity and inefficiency. Families are left to juggle multiple providers, schools are burdened with coordinating external staff, and outcomes vary widely.

Using private providers to deliver foundational supports will only replicate these problems. Whether it is framed as “partnering with” or “contracting out” to the private sector, the result will be the same: multiple competing providers, inconsistent quality, gaps in coverage, and duplication of the very issues the NDIS has struggled with. Instead, Thriving Kids should build a directly delivered public service at scale. Where state disability services remain, they should be the first point of delivery. Where they no longer exist, schools and ECEC, supported by community health services, should be the natural home for this work.

Only a public service model can:

  • Guarantee equity of access across regions and communities.
  • Deliver at the scale required.
  • Integrate seamlessly with education and early learning.
  • Provide stability for families and staff, rather than the churn of competitive tendering.

As one parent described to us:

“I don’t want another provider to manage. I want the people who already know my kid, to have the support to do the job properly.”

Conclusion

The current system of disability support is fragmented, inequitable and unsafe. Families are burdened, schools are left to coordinate, and staff are exposed to risk. But embedded in schools and ECEC are the foundations of a better model.

The ECIA National Guidelines already show what best practice looks like, supports delivered in natural environments, embedded in daily routines, and built on collaboration. Schools and ECEC are the places that can deliver this.

Thriving Kids is an opportunity to align policy with evidence. By embedding supports in mainstream settings, unifying planning frameworks, recognising the 30 hours of intervention delivered by Education Support Staff and Educators each week, and resourcing the workforce, Thriving Kids can deliver a system where every child with disability has access to consistent, effective support. A system where staff and families are no longer left to carry the burden alone.

Sources PART 1

PART 2

Early Childhood Education and Care

In early childhood education and care (ECEC) children with additional needs may be eligible to receive support through the Inclusion Support Program (ISP). However, there are serious problems with the ISP, including the reliance on formal diagnosis for ongoing support, long wait times, and inadequate support and funding even where all criteria have been met. The reality is that educators are providing support to children with developmental delay, autism and other additional needs in services every day, but because of serious flaws in the ISP, many are doing it without the additional staffing resources, training or support they need. When designing the Thriving Kids program, the Federal Government must ensure it works alongside reforms to the ISP to fully support educators in meeting the needs of children with additional needs.

In UWU’s June- August 2025 survey of over 3,000 educators, almost four out of five educators said that there are more safety incidents in their service because of a lack of support for educators working with children with additional needs. One educator told us, “[there are] 8 children in my room who have trouble regulating their emotions with potentially a diagnosis needed in future. Only one child with a diagnosis, hard for little ones to get that diagnosis and then be entitled to inclusion support.” Another said, “[We] gained complex inclusion support, but funding has run out so no additional support for [the] remainder of the year.” The lack of adequate inclusion support staffing means children are left without the supports they need to thrive, and it also adds to workload, stress and pressure on educators, exacerbating workforce shortages.

Research consistently demonstrates that early childhood is a critical time for intervention, that early experiences shape our lives by affecting the way the young brain develops, and that what happens to us in the early years has a major effect on our health and development through to adulthood.^i^ It is unacceptable that many children with additional needs in early learning settings in Australia do not have access to the support they need to thrive.

Educators report that the requirement for a formal diagnosis of young children is a major barrier to accessing support through the ISP. This is supported by the findings of the Commonwealth Department of Education’s Review into the ISP conducted in 2023.^ii^ It may take years for a child to receive a diagnosis due to a combination of factors; the child may be too young to receive a diagnosis, the parents may be hesitant to pursue a formal diagnosis for their child, and it may take years to get a diagnosis due to specialists’ waitlists. Often, by the time a child has received a diagnosis, they are at the age to begin formal schooling. This is not to mention additional barriers for

families in regional and rural Australia, or First Nations families in remote communities. UWU urges the Federal Government to undertake reform to ensure that a formal diagnosis is not required to receive ongoing support. In addition, educators should be able to use their professional judgement and apply for ISP funding if they have identified the need for it, but where families are unable or unwilling to apply.

Compounding these problems, wait times for the ISP have blown out as applications have increased, and services are waiting weeks if not months for funding.^iii^ The workforce crisis has also created acute problems where ISP educators are used in centres to cover breaks of other staff, and to meet minimum ratio requirements. This is not fair to either the educators nor the child that needs and deserves support.

Further, even when all criteria have been met, and support obtained through the ISP, the amount of funding available through the ISP is inadequate. Even when an application is approved, the wage subsidy for an additional educator covers only up to 25 hours per week, capped at $23 per hour (below wages set by the Children’s Services Award 2010).^iv^ For a shared care arrangement where more than 1 child in a service receives support, a wage subsidy of up to 40 hours per week is available, also capped at $23 per hour.^v^ Also, parents and guardians may need children to attend for more hours than there is inclusion support funding for. A high-quality provider may put in additional staffing at their own cost, but others, particularly providers that prioritise profit over care, will not, adding to the workload of educators. We have also heard that some providers may advise the parents or guardians that the child can only be enrolled in the service for limited hours, or decline to enrol a child, which unfairly restricts access to ECEC for children with additional needs.

UWU urges the Federal Government to ensure that wages for additional educators under the ISP are funded at the relevant award or enterprise agreement rate at a minimum, and to remove the cap on how many additional educator hours of support can be obtained. Children with additional needs must be provided with the full support they need, rather than have their supports be restricted by artificial limits. This will ensure children with additional needs are better supported, reduce the workload burden on educators in the sector, and ensure all children in a service receive the support and attention they deserve at a critical time in their development.

The Department of Education’s 2023 review of the ISP also identified a misalignment between supports available under the NDIS and the ISP, including that enrolling a child who receives support through the NDIS does not necessarily mean the service will receive ISP to provide additional support while the child is attending ECEC.^vi^ This can result in children having a gap in supports, and

educators without the resources and support to meet the needs of children in their service. It is essential that the Thriving Kids program is integrated and operates cohesively with the ISP, so that children with additional needs are fully supported in early learning settings. The Federal Government must also ensure that any future reforms to the ISP or broader ECEC funding system align and work cohesively with the Thriving Kids program.

UWU believes that comprehensive support for children with additional needs can best be provided through a public ECEC system, where the profit motive is removed, and children’s needs and high-quality care are prioritised. In current circumstances, the Federal Government should ensure that the Thriving Kids program, in conjunction with reforms to the ISP, addresses serious gaps in the system as outlined above, and fully meets the needs of children with additional needs in ECEC settings.

Sources PART 2

^i^ Early Childhood Intervention Australia, National guidelines: Best practice in early childhood intervention. Department of Social Services (2016), pg.4, retrieved from https://www.dss.gov.au/system/files/documents/2024-11/ecia-national-guidelines-best-practice-early-childhood-intervention-2016.pdf ^ii^ Deloitte Access Economics, ‘Review of the Inclusion Support Program: Final Report’, on behalf of the Australian Government Department of Education (September 2023), pg. xvii-xviii, retrieved from: https://www.education.gov.au/early-childhood/resources/inclusion-support-program-review-final-report ^iii^ Ibid, pg. 54. ^iv^ Department of Education, Inclusion Support Program guidelines. Australian Government (2015), pg. 39, retrieved from https://www.education.gov.au/download/2994/inclusion-support-program-guidelines/42201/document/pd ^v^ Ibid. ^vi^ Review of the Inclusion Support Program – Final Report, see pg.41-42, including findings 1-3.