Submission to the House Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability Inquiry into the
Thriving Kids Initiative
Summary
This submission draws on 30 years of experience as a neurodivergent teacher, educator, and more recently NDIS registered Behaviour Practitioner, Early Childhood key worker and director of a multidisciplinary practice providing supports both within community, grant funded progams as well as providing NDIS funded services. It highlights concerns with existing disparities with acess to supports and a need for wrap around supports for children, grounded in their family, community and environment and utilising the existing expertise and capacity but targeted more fairer.
Key points:
- Access to support is currently dependent on expensive, evidence based assessment, which is inaccessible to families with intersectional disadvantage.
- Existing early intervention service providers are best placed to work with children in their local communities and local mainstream services.
- Trauma informed practice must be embedded with the child’s individual strengths, neurotype and learning abilities encouraged and allowed to flourish, rather than focussing purely on deficits and intolerance for differences.
- Parent and the community in which a child is embedded are key to a childs wellbeing; the child’s family, education setting and community must be involved, included and considered in any early intervention.
- The current data of 16% of boys and 7% of girls aged 6 now accessing NDIS shows a gender disparity which indicates girls with developmental delays or neurodivergence are identified less often than boys (https://www.ndis.gov.au/news/10850-stronger-ndis-improving-lives-participants)
- Children with developmental delays, significant experience of trauma, or ADHD may present similarly to autistic children in early years, however have limited pathways for early intervention support.
- The NDIA have identified that participation rates peak at ages 5-7, at the same age as many children typically start school. (https://www.ndis.gov.au/news/10850-stronger-ndis-improving-lives-participants) Other options for identifying children’s need for support include targeted health screenings and supports, initiatives such as Communities for children, childcare, local community groups and parent support groups.
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The Thriving Kids program has the opportunity to identify and provide access to children needing early intervention in a more inclusive way.
Discussion:
Significant investment has been made into the NDIS scheme, including providing early intervention supports to individuals in a targeted way since the inception of the scheme. Many individual service providers are embedded in local communities and have developed local collaborative networks with schools, early childhood settings, communities and mainstream services. While these providers work effectively with NDIS funded child participants, their expertise and services remain inaccessible to many children who require support. This particularly impacts and includes:
- Children from socio-economically disadvantaged families and communities
redacted- First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse children, families and communities, where chidens developmental and language delays may be attributed cultural and language differences.
redacted- Children who do not display behavioural challenges, or are not disruptive in classrooms
- Children under the guardianship of the minister, or with significant trauma where early intervention is equally as valuable as for children with other disabilities.
Identifying children requiring early intervention support
While school and early childhood intervention settings may identify children not meeting expected school and group ready behaviours for their age, and with some language and learning challenges, other networks in a child’s life, such as community, health services and parents themselves may raise concerns. In my experience, additional targeted supports and services provided in areas with greater intersectional disadvantage such as Nunkuwarrin Yunti health services, Child and Youth Health services, and Communities for Children programs, have been very supportive of identifying children requiring support and can provide referral pathways. The challenge has been finding specialised services outside of NDIS to refer to. Public health system waitlists for childhood assessments required for NDIS access are extensive, in some cases several years meaning children miss out on support during formative years. There is a need for accessible early childhood screening and assessments where concerns may be raised, or more importantly, missed. In addition, identifying children demonstrating externalised behaviours of concern but missing others means children with needs may go unidentified and unsupported, leading to a greater lifelong impact on their health, wellbeing and learning. Once identified, specialised services for early childhood intervention, of which the NDIS is a key provider, need to be made more readily available, to children when and as they need it.
Service delivery
In our community, we have identified the need for smaller, individualised group and individual, programs and services, than we are able to deliver with existing grants and community opportunities, to build group
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readiness and develop skills with not just the children, but their parents, their education settings and community environments, in trauma informed, and developmentally appropriate, strength focussed and evidence based ways. While we are able to deliver these to children who have met the criteria to access NDIS funding, we are constantly concerned about the children who have been unable to meet the NDIS eligibility criteria, especially First Nations children in our community. We have developed networks and connections and are well placed to provide support, including Developmental Education and Early Childhood social skills development supports, and are finding it more difficult to meet the needs of our local community with less grants and funding available outside of the NDIS. Ideally utilising services such as ours to provide early intervention supports to more, rather than less children, would likely lead to less need better outcomes for more children. There is precedent for In Kind supports being delivered via the NDIS, for state funded supports and services, and many of the businesses and organisations who have built connection, expertise and experience in identifying, supporting and working with neurodivergent and developmentally delayed children have the knowledge and local networks to work holistically with children needing supports and their families and communities.
Contact for follow-up:
Margret (Meg) Eusope
Founder & Director, Diverse Learning
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