Emerging Minds.

Emerging Minds response to the Inquiry into the Thriving Kids initiative

Submitted by: Brad Morgan
Director, Emerging Minds
(08) 8367 0888

redacted

Executive summary

Purpose and scope of submission

This submission by Emerging Minds responds to the House Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability’s Inquiry into the Thriving Kids initiative.

This submission draws on Emerging Minds’ extensive engagement with professionals and families across Australia to highlight key contextual and systems-level challenges affecting child development, mental health and wellbeing. It presents a series of evidence-informed recommendations, supported by national and international research and practice insights, to guide the effective design and delivery of the Thriving Kids initiative to ensure it is a sustainable national platform.

Summary of key considerations and recommendations

Emerging Minds recommends a strategic and coordinated approach to the design and delivery of the Thriving Kids initiative, structured around three core areas:

Principles for design and delivery:
- Prioritise a child-centred design for Thriving Kids, with mainstream services and foundational supports wrapped around the child in their community.
- Align efforts to meet children’s mental health, wellbeing and development needs, acknowledging any overlap.
- Ensure the initiative reflects a comprehensive and coordinated system of child development and wellbeing.
- Prioritise meaningful inclusion of community voice and embed lived experience perspectives that ensure equitable, sustainable, culturally safe and inclusive design and delivery.
- Adopt a family-focused approach, and prioritise information, learning, support and navigation assistance for parents.
Mechanisms for support:
- Leverage existing systems and infrastructure to support implementation.
- Embed system infrastructure that enables effective federal oversight, state-level implementation and contextualised local delivery.
- Creation of a digital information platform that provides parents and carers with trusted and evidence-based information to recognise early developmental differences and navigate services with confidence.
- Embed cultural leadership in the design and delivery of services.
Workforce support and development:
- Create a workforce development strategy that includes a capability framework to support the implementation of Thriving Kids.
- Scale the existing national infrastructure (e.g. the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health) to deliver workforce training and mentoring across the Thriving Kids workforces.

About Emerging Minds

Emerging Minds has over 30 years’ experience designing and delivering national initiatives to improve the mental health, development and wellbeing of Australian infants, children, adolescents and their families. Through its initiatives, Emerging Minds develops infant and child mental health policy, evidence-informed workforce training and professional learning and practice development resources to address the needs of organisations, professionals, children and their families. These efforts are designed to:

Strengthen the capability of professionals to identify and respond early to children’s needs.
Improve coordination between sectors to reduce fragmentation and enable timely support.
Equip parents and carers with reliable information and tools to promote their children’s wellbeing.

Our work integrates research evidence, practitioner wisdom and lived experience to strengthen capacity across workforces, organisations and systems to respond to the mental health, development and wellbeing needs of infants, children, young people and their families.

Emerging Minds leads the federally funded National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health (NWC), which has engaged more than 130,000 professionals and 3,000 organisations across key sectors since 2017.

Key considerations and recommendations

1. Principles for design and delivery

Prioritise a child-centred design for Thriving Kids with mainstream services and foundational supports wrapped around the child in their community.
Align efforts to meet children’s mental health, wellbeing and development needs, acknowledging any overlap.
Ensure the initiative reflects a comprehensive and coordinated system of child development and wellbeing.
Prioritise meaningful inclusion of community voice and embed lived experience perspectives that ensure equitable, sustainable, culturally safe and inclusive design and delivery.
Adopt a family-focused approach, and prioritise information, learning, support and navigation assistance for parents.

A child-centred service landscape for Thriving Kids

Findings from Emerging Minds consultation for the Scoping child mental health workforce capability project (Goodyear et al., 2024), coupled with stakeholder feedback gathered through continuous, system-wide engagement activities, reveal that Australian families encounter a complex and fragmented landscape when seeking help for their child’s development, autism or mental health. Services are often siloed across health, education, disability and social care. Parents report being asked to repeat their story, navigating multiple eligibility assessments and waiting lists, and struggling to understand which supports are right for their child.

The Thriving Kids initiative provides an opportunity to design a new service system – one with a child-centred focus, which enables equitable and sustainable supports that wrap around the child and their family to improve access and ease of navigation.

The connection between child development, disability and mental health

Children’s developmental and mental health needs are inseparable. Developmental delay is not only a public health issue but also a predictor of later social and emotional difficulties (Boulton et al., 2023; Green et al., 2018). The 2024 Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) found 23.5% of children starting school are developmentally vulnerable on one or more domains, and vulnerability in emotional maturity is rising (AEDC, 2024).

These vulnerabilities don’t occur in isolation; they exist within a child’s ecology – relationships, environments and life experiences. Adversities such as family violence, poverty and parental mental ill-health can disrupt development and mental health. Conversely, strong relationships, safe environments and responsive support can buffer risk and promote resilience. Thriving Kids should explicitly build on this bidirectional relationship between children’s and families’ wellbeing.

Ensuring Thriving Kids is comprehensive and coordinated

The conceptualisation of a comprehensive and coordinated child mental health system offers a valuable framework for guiding the design and implementation of the Thriving Kids initiative. Central to this framework is the emphasis on coordination, ensuring that services are not only available, but also connected, aligned and responsive to the diverse needs of children and their families. A coordinated system therefore enables children and families to access the right support at the right time, in the settings they engage with every day. This helps avoid fragmentation and ensure long-term impact.

Embedding this framework into Thriving Kids also positions the initiative within a broader system of child development and wellbeing, while strengthening its alignment with national strategies, such as the National Children’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy, the National Autism Strategy, and Australia’s Disability Strategy. Together these strategies advocate for early intervention and prevention, inclusive and child-centred approaches, and the creation of enabling environments, particularly within education and community settings.

Importantly, using a system-level lens reinforces the understanding that no single program can address the complex and interconnected needs of children and families. Thriving Kids should be positioned not as a standalone initiative, but as a strategic enabler within a broader ecosystem of support. This framing helps avoid the perception that programs alone can resolve systemic challenges, particularly within education settings, and instead highlights the importance of integrated, developmentally informed approaches.

The importance of being family-focused

Thriving Kids should be underpinned by a family-focused approach. Services and supports, though implemented through mainstream settings, must maintain a family focus and empower parents as key enablers of their child’s care. Children exist in environments that shape the development and wellbeing. The importance of this is highlighted by the known impact of parental mental health concerns on child wellbeing outcomes (Naughton et al., 2018). Furthermore, interventions with a strong evidence base for improving child outcomes are often targeting parenting and the home environment as foundations of change. For example, family interventions that support parents with mental health challenges or alcohol and other drug issues can reduce the intergenerational effects on children’s development and mental health by about 30% (Siegenthaler et al., 2012).

Having a foundational focus on the family, including the child and their parents, includes considering parents’ needs for information, learning, support and navigational guidance in ways that are accessible and approachable. This focus on family is aligned with the European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s (ESCAP’s) evidence-based practice guidance for Autism (Feuntes et al., 2021) and with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines for Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Consultation with community groups: Child and family voice, First Nations, culturally and linguistically diverse communities

Designing Thriving Kids with, and not just for, families will strengthen its impact. Those with lived experience of developmental and mental health needs hold essential knowledge about what works (and what doesn’t). This includes consultation and partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) groups, children and families with lived experience of mental health and disability, and carers. Embedding these perspectives ensures culturally safe, inclusive, neuro-affirming and locally relevant design and delivery.

Emerging Minds demonstrates leadership in this space, drawing on direct consultation with children, families and lived experience networks to inform practice, workforce development, and resource creation. Specific consultation mechanisms led by Emerging Minds include the Child and Youth Expert Panel, National Mental Health Lived Experience Peak Body for Families and Carers, National Family Forum, Child and Family Partnership Network, Lived Experience Sub-Committee of the Emerging Minds Board, and the Child Voice Community of Practice. These groups provide critical insight into the real-world needs of children and families and can be leveraged to ensure that Thriving Kids is grounded in lived experience and responsive to diverse community contexts.

2. Mechanisms for support

Leverage existing systems and infrastructure to support implementation.
Embed system infrastructure that enables effective federal oversight, state-level implementation and contextualised local delivery.
Creation of a digital information platform that provides parents and carers with trusted and evidence-based information to recognise early developmental differences and navigate services with confidence.
Embed cultural leadership.

Leveraging existing health and education infrastructure

Thriving Kids should be designed to build upon and strengthen existing national service delivery infrastructure, rather than creating parallel systems. This approach, informed by the comprehensive and coordinated framework, ensures efficient implementation, reduces duplication, and supports continuity for professionals and families already engaged with trusted platforms.

Two key platforms – Emerging Minds and Be You – offer established infrastructure that can be leveraged to support Thriving Kids. Together, they form a coordinated and trusted ecosystem for children, young people, families and educators. Emerging Minds provides national leadership in child mental health workforce development across health, social services and community sectors. Be You supports educators and others working in education settings to promote mental health and wellbeing in schools and early learning services. These platforms already deliver:

evidence-informed training and resources across sectors
established networks and communities of practice that can be mobilised to support Thriving Kids
cross-sector alignment that enables shared language and goals between health, education, and social services; and
place-based engagement through national reach and local partnerships.

Additionally, education settings (such as schools and early learning services) are key mainstream environments where children’s developmental and wellbeing needs are observed and supported. They are therefore ideally placed to deliver supports with in the child’s environment. This approach is supported in the European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s (ESCAP) evidence-based practice guidance for Autism, which highlights that schools and community settings can successfully deliver psychosocial interventions (Feuntes et al., 2021). The initiative must therefore be designed to integrate with and strengthen existing education infrastructure, recognising the critical role these settings play in early identification and support.

While these settings already demonstrate a strong foundational understanding of child development, it is essential to acknowledge the existing pressures on the education workforce, including challenges relating to capacity, resourcing, training and role clarity. Any implementation strategy need to include targeted support across all levels of both systems, covering state, regional and local leadership, while ensuring that existing infrastructure is resourced and empowered to deliver Thriving Kids sustainably.

Embedding infrastructure for national oversight and local delivery

To ensure Thriving Kids is implemented effectively and sustained over time, it is essential to embed system infrastructure that enables strong federal oversight, coordinated state-level implementation and flexible, locally responsive delivery. This approach supports national consistency, while allowing services to adapt to the unique needs of communities, particularly in rural and remote areas.

Centralised stewardship is critical to guide implementation and ensure alignment across sectors that form part of the foundational supports landscape. Without coordinated leadership, efforts risk becoming fragmented and inconsistent, which can compromise access, equity and service quality. Embedding infrastructure that supports shared governance and accountability across health, education, disability and social services will help integrate services, and align them with community priorities.

Funding models must also be designed to support this infrastructure. Too often, rigid funding structures limit the ability of services to respond to local needs or transition successful pilot programs into long-term initiatives. To enable effective local delivery, funding must support multidisciplinary care across settings and allow for innovation and adaptation based on workforce capacity and community context.

In addition, commissioning approaches should consider workforce development and retention as a core component of system infrastructure. A stable, skilled workforce is essential for delivering consistent, high-quality care. Long-term investment in training, supervision and career pathways will help embed the structural supports needed to sustain Thriving Kids, and improve outcomes for children and families.

The US-developed ‘system of care’ framework (Stroul et al., 2021) provides a compelling model for national reform of child and youth mental health systems. Its structured approach to governance, investment and service system collaboration offers valuable insights for the implementation of initiatives such as Thriving Kids in Australia. Key infrastructure elements – such as centrally administered grants to support place-based implementation, mechanisms for coordinated regional service planning, and cross-system governance with shared accountability for outcomes – create the conditions for scalable, equitable and sustainable reform. This model underscores the importance of aligning national oversight with local responsiveness to drive systemic change, and demonstrates that joint commissioning and pooled funding can reduce duplication and improve service continuity.

Digital information platform

Parents are often the first to notice developmental concerns, but report significant difficulty in accessing trusted, easy-to-understand resources and guidance. This leads to confusion and delays in acting on concerns (Parenting Research Centre, 2022). These issues mirror findings from the Digital Navigation Project lead by SANE Australia (Green et al., 2025) which offers important lessons from the mental health digital ecosystem that are relevant for the parenting and child development systems. This project found a confusing duplication of online resources, leading to poor navigation and trust. It also found gaps in culturally safe and accessible formats, particularly for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and CALD families, and identified the need for personalised, human-supported navigation (e.g. through family peer workers or navigators) alongside digital tools. The project recommended developing integrated navigation solutions that consolidate evidence-based information, connect families to local supports, and ensure resources are designed with and for diverse families. Such an approach would support Thriving Kids’ aim of early identification and intervention by making entry points simpler and more equitable.

The creation of a digital information platform that provides parents and carers with trusted, evidence-based information to help them recognise early developmental differences and navigate services with confidence could also support more equitable access for regional and remote families across Australia.

Embed cultural leadership

To ensure the design and implementation of Thriving Kids is culturally safe and accessible to First Nations communities, Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) should have a central role in co-design and delivery of the initiative. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families are often found to have relatively poorer access to health services compared to non-Indigenous Australians, and experience barriers to accessing healthcare such as language, discrimination and services that don’t reflect cultural norms (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2025). These barriers highlight the need for culturally responsive approaches that are led by community members.

Community-controlled and culturally led models improve service uptake, build trust and improve long-term outcomes. Commissioning ACCOs from the outset would allow Thriving Kids to be locally adapted, culturally safe and sustainable. In addition to improving service delivery, partnering with ACCOs also contributes to building a culturally competent workforce and strengthens local capacity. Such an approach also aligns with national commitments such as the Closing the Gap national agreement, which has shared-decision making, strengthening the community-controlled sector and improving mainstream institutions at its core (Closing the Gap, 2020).

3. Workforce support and development

Create a workforce development strategy that includes a capability framework to support the implementation of Thriving Kids.
Scale the existing national infrastructure (e.g. the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health) to deliver workforce training and mentoring across the Thriving Kids workforces.

For early intervention to be effective, it requires a holistic, multidisciplinary approach that wraps around children and their families. Evidence shows that when multidisciplinary professionals work together collaboratively, children with developmental needs are more likely to receive child-centred, holistic and integrated support (Sun et al., 2024). A well-integrated child development workforce is essential to delivering support within mainstream settings.

However, the workforces supporting children and families with developmental delay, Autism and mental health needs are in short supply, maldistributed and have varying levels of capability to respond (Goodyear et al., 2024). The same workforces are also in demand across other health, mental health, disability, education and social service reforms. Additionally, the evidence highlights a need to rethink how to build workforce capacity to respond more promptly to emerging needs. This includes equipping existing and emerging workforces (such as allied health assistants, peer and lived experience workforces and education support staff) with the skills and confidence to support children and families in schools and communities. It also requires enabling clinical and allied health professionals to adopt low-intensity, early interventions that address emerging indicators of distress.

Supporting workforce preparedness and creating workforce development strategy

Emerging Minds currently works with key service sectors and workforces that are relevant to the priority cohorts identified for the Thriving Kids Initiative. This includes child and family health nurses, early childhood educators, teachers, primary care providers, general practitioners and community health practitioners. In addition, Emerging Minds partners with organisations to deliver professional support through online learning and communities of practice to disability and early intervention service providers supporting children. These supports are designed to strengthen the understanding and responsiveness of disability service providers to the co-occurring presentations of disability, developmental needs, mental health and family mental health.

Findings from the 2024 Scoping Child Mental Health Workforce Capability project identified key workforce competencies needed to support the development and social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB) of Australian children. Project analysis revealed gaps in existing frameworks in relation to the social and cultural dimensions of SEWB, particularly for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, as well as for children from CALD communities. These gaps highlight the need for a more inclusive and responsive approach to workforce development. A cross-sector workforce capability strategy is needed to support implementation. The workforce development strategy should be informed by data and modelling of workforce needs and include a national Child Development Capability Framework. This framework would outline the key skills, capabilities and knowledge required for professionals to provide support to children and families working in child development.

Utilising the broader child mental health and wellbeing workforce to support Thriving Kids implementation and delivery will require a cohesive approach to workforce development, reflective of the different settings. Scaling existing national infrastructure (e.g. the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health) to deliver training and mentoring across the Thriving Kids workforces could be an efficient way to support workforce development.

References

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