Submission Inquiry into the Thriving Kids
Initiative
Allison Dodd, Bree Barker, Dr Nicole Sharp
Believe and Become Pty Ltd, October 2025
Dear House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability:
Dr Mike Freelander MP (Chair)
Dr Monique Ryan MP (Deputy Chair)
Ms Jodie Belyea MP
Mr Sam Birrell MP
Mr Cameron Caldwell MP
Ms Ali France MP
Ms Alice Jordan-Baird MP
Dr Gordon Reid MP
Dr Sophie Scamps MP
Ms Anne Stanley MP
and the Thriving Kids Advisory Committee:
The Hon Mark Butler MP (Co-Chair)
Professor Frank Oberklaid, Co-Group Leader, Policy and Equity Murdoch Children’s Research
Institute (Co-Chair)
Dr Anoo Bhopti, Course Director, Master of Occupational Therapy Practice Program, Monash
University
Dr Caroline Croser-Barlow, Chief Executive Officer, The Front Project
Andrew Davis, Chief Executive Officer, Autism CRC
Angela Falkenberg, President, Australian Primary Principals Association
Morgan Fitzpatrick, Koorana Child & Family Services and Lived Experience Parent Representative
Denise Imms, Senior Speech Pathologist
Matthew Johnson, President, Australian Special Education Principals Association
Dr Tim Jones, Chair, Specific Interests, Child and Young Person’s Health, The Royal Australian
College of General Practitioners
Skye Kakoschke-Moore, Chief Executive Officer, Children and Young People with Disability
Australia
Samantha Page, Chief Executive Officer, Early Childhood Australia
Elly Robinson, Principal Specialist, Parenting Research Centre
Dr Louise Wightman, Clinical Nurse Maternal, Child and Family Health, Nurses Australia
Gretchen Young, Executive Director Programs, SNAICC National Voice for Our Children
Thank you for the opportunity to provide a submission to the Inquiry into the Thriving Kids initiative. Together we bring over 30 years’ experience in the disability, health and education sectors, as occupational and play therapists, researchers, and educators. In our current work at Believe and Become, we specialise in supporting children and young people with developmental delay and autism. We have extensive experience supporting the children the Thriving Kids initiative proposes to target and their families and carers. On a daily basis we support them to navigate the NDIS, education, health and community services sectors, provide therapeutic supports to build capacity towards goals, address barriers to goal achievement, and support children and their families as they encounter challenge after challenge. We also contribute to the identification of autism and ADHD based on the National Best Practice Guidelines through multidisciplinary assessments.
This report provides our recommendations and outlines our concerns around the proposed Thriving Kids initiative, specifically regarding its implications for children with autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and developmental delays, as well as the broader impact on
the disability community and sector, including families, carers, clinicians, service providers and broader service systems including education, health, justice, and community services.
Importantly, we also represent lived experience perspectives, with our team including people with lived experience of autism, ADHD, and parents of neurodivergent children. Our extensive clinical experience and professional knowledge, along with our lived experience, make us well placed to contribute to this inquiry.
Our submission is formatted in line with the terms of reference of the inquiry.
- Examine evidence-based information and resources that could assist parents identify if their child has mild to moderate development delay and support parents to provide support to these children.
National Guidelines (e.g. National Best Practice Framework for Early Childhood Intervention,
ChildKind Best Practice Framework) emphasise the importance of early identification and support for children with developmental concerns, delay or disability. It is absolutely vital this early identification is facilitated by highly trained, qualified and experienced health professionals, and is accessible to every child through equitable screening services. It is just as vital that when a development concern, delay or disability is identified, early intervention is facilitated without delay. We increasingly are seeing children with clear delays denied access to NDIS early intervention, with decisions often being made by early childhood partners with less training, qualifications and experience than the health professionals providing the evidence of need. This is extremely frustrating for all involved and impacts children’s access to vital early intervention services, delays progress and impacts long term outcomes.
Validated screening tools such as the Social Attention and Communication Surveillance (SACS) https://www.latrobe.edu.au/otarc/research/autism-detection-diagnosis/social-attention-communication and Ages and Stages Questionnaires (ASQ-3) https://agesandstages.com/ are available and should be used routinely during early childhood screening checks. Currently there is inconsistency around early childhood screening practices across jurisdictions. Neurodiversity-affirming and strengths-based supports and services need to be the standard, as identified in the National Autism Strategy (National Autism Strategy 2025–2031). Interventions currently being discussed as likely to be included within Thriving Kids, based on behavioural approaches, are neither neurodiversity-affirming nor strengths-based. It is absolutely essential the Committee take heed of the large and ever-increasing body of evidence highlighting the trauma created by behavioural approaches such as Applied Behavioural Analysis and programs based on similar principles (e.g. Kupferstein, 2018).
- Examine the effectiveness of current (and previous) programs and initiatives that identify children with development delay, autism or both, with mild to moderate support needs and support them and their families. This should focus on community and mainstream engagement, and include child and maternal health, primary care, allied health playgroups, early childhood education and care and schools.
Effective initiatives that identify and support children with developmental delay or autism, or both, are based on genuine co-design and consultation, principles embedded in our National Guidelines along with the NDIS legislation and policies. Despite this, we are seeing a lack of transparency around the Thriving Kids initiative, rushed plans for rollout without clear guidelines or co-design. Autistic people, health professionals, families and carers alike are sick of lip-service co-design efforts, where people invest significant time and energy again and again to share their vital lived experience, for it to be ignored time and time again in favour of cost-cutting measures. Genuine co-design with people with disability, families, health professionals, and educators is essential to ensure any future initiative meets real-world needs, is achievable and sustainable.
Children with mild to moderate developmental delays are increasingly being turned away from the NDIS and redirected toward community-based supports, which very often don’t exist. In our area of South-Western Sydney, families have access to one free supported playgroup once per week during school terms. Teachers are overwhelmed by the level of support needs within mainstream classrooms, students are unable to access vital support classes or specialist schools due to the overwhelming need and limited availability, and the rate of homeschooling of students with disability due to unmet needs in mainstream settings is skyrocketing. This is not offering any level of confidence in the capacity of mainstream community services to meet increasing needs of children with autism and developmental delays.
While community-based supports may appear to be a cost-saving measure, it fails to acknowledge that even children with mild to moderate needs often require specialist, targeted, multidisciplinary, coordinated interventions that are best delivered by qualified professionals within a structured and well-resourced framework. It also fails to acknowledge the known economic benefits of early intervention in terms of long-term outcomes and economic participation.
The proposed shift under the Thriving Kids initiative risks dismantling access to therapy plans that are carefully designed and delivered by university-qualified allied health professionals— experts who have undergone extensive training in their respective fields. Occupational Therapy, our particular area of expertise, is grounded in goal-directed, client-centred interventions that are responsive to the unique developmental, sensory, and functional needs of each child. Replacing these specialised services with block-funded or generic programs not only dilutes the effectiveness of therapy but also undermines the principles of evidence-based practice. These generic models often lack the flexibility, intensity, and clinical oversight required to support meaningful progress, especially for children with neurodevelopmental differences. Therefore, the system ends up wasting money anyway—redirecting public funds into services that are ill equipped to deliver measurable outcomes. Instead of investing in interventions that prevent escalation of needs and promote long-term independence, resources are spent on broad programs that may fail to engage children meaningfully or reach those who really need it. This not only compromises developmental outcomes but also increases the likelihood of future
reliance on more intensive supports, creating a false economy that ultimately costs more— both financially and socially. Have we forgotten all the reasons the NDIS came about in the first place?
We absolutely support the vital need for more community and mainstream engagement for children with developmental delay and their families, including accessible, timely and evidence based child and maternal health, primary care, and allied health services. We urgently need early childhood education and care settings and schools to better support the needs of children with developmental delay and disability. However, this requires additional targeted, consistent and equitable funding across jurisdictions, and must not replace access to the NDIS for those who need it.
- Identify equity and intersectional issues, in particular, children who identify as First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse. First Nations and CALD families often experience systemic racism, reduced access to diagnosis and services, and find mainstream supports culturally unsafe. It is essential trauma-informed, culturally safe services are prioritised.
Recommendations include funding culturally safe, community-controlled supports and ensuring geographic equity (e.g. telehealth, mobile outreach for rural/remote areas).
Girls, gender-diverse children, and non-speaking/AAC users are often identified later, highlighting the need for earlier, affirming identification (National Autism Strategy, 2025).
- Identify gaps in workforce support and training required to deliver Thriving Kids. Insufficient Infrastructure and Workforce Readiness is a significant barrier to the success of Thriving Kids. Schools and community settings are expected to absorb the responsibility for delivering foundational supports. However, many educators and community providers lack training, resources, and capacity to deliver disability-informed care.
Workforce shortages, inconsistent training, and lack of integration are major barriers (National Autism Strategy, 2025).
Training should be standardised, co-designed with Autistic people, and mandatory for frontline roles (maternal and child health nurses, GPs, paediatricians, allied health providers, early childhood educators, teachers etc).
Key capabilities include neurodiversity affirming foundations, relationship and regulation-first approaches, universal design for learning, and role-specific competence (National Autism Strategy, 2025). It is extremely difficult to see how it will be possible to achieve this in settings (e.g. general practice, community services, schools, early learning centres) that are already overloaded. Ongoing professional development, cultural competency, and trauma-aware training are vital across all areas.
- Draw on domestic and international policy experience and best practice.
Australian policy (e.g. National Autism Strategy, National Best Practice Framework) emphasises
early, inclusive, neurodiversity-affirming support, and co-design with lived experience. The approach to date with the Thriving Kids initiative seems in stark contrast.
The UK Core Capabilities Framework for Supporting Autistic People similarly highlights the importance of recognising the strengths and abilities of autistic people, listening to their experience and expertise, enabling choice and autonomy, protecting human rights, working in partnership with autistic people, teams, communities and organisations, and valuing collaborative involvement and co-production with autistic people to improve person-centred design and quality of services.
It is absolutely essential that efforts to reform the NDIS and broader service systems in Australia do not undo all of the progress made to date.
- Identify mechanisms that would allow a seamless transition through mainstream systems for all children with mild to moderate support needs. Community-based supports, while extremely valuable and necessary in addition to specialised services for those who need them, do not have the infrastructure, workforce, or clinical expertise to deliver the level of care required to support children with developmental delay or autism to reach their goals and potential. These services are often generic, underfunded, and not designed to meet the complex and individualised needs of neurodivergent children. As a result, children may receive diluted or inappropriate interventions, leading to poorer outcomes and increased reliance on more intensive services later in life.
Furthermore, this shift effectively removes choice and control from families—core principles of the NDIS. Parents and carers lose the ability to select providers who understand their child’s unique profile, and children lose the opportunity to engage in therapy that is tailored to their strengths, challenges, and goals. This undermines their rights as individuals with disabilities and erodes their ability to advocate for themselves in a system that should be empowering, not limiting. A single neurodiversity affirming pathway starting at first concern (e.g. raised to child health nurse or GP) and following the child across services is recommended (National Autism Strategy, 2025). This will require early developmental monitoring/screening and affordable assessment with clear referral criteria, immediate, free affirming parent coaching at first concern, mandatory Handover Reports from every provider, with explicit continuation-of-supports commitment in schools, school entry plans prioritising psychological safety, sensory/environmental adjustments, and belonging, personalised planning, relational continuity, and cross-sector collaboration. This needs to be supported by significant effort to improve the acceptance and inclusion of people with disability within mainstream and community settings, including schools, sporting and creative clubs and programs etc. There remain extreme barriers to true participation and inclusion for people with disability in Australia which must be addressed urgently. In addition to the above, it is vital that the NDIS remains accessible to all children, young people and adults who require it. Mainstream system improvements are essential, but should not replace access to specialist supports and services.
Conclusion
As clinicians, we have worked closely with children with developmental delay and autism and their families for many many years. We have consistently collaborated with the NDIS and early childhood partners, other health professionals, disability providers, educators, employers and other stakeholders, and know in detail the barriers that continue to be encountered by vulnerable children in our community. Most importantly, members of our team have lived these barriers ourselves.
We urge policymakers to reconsider the current trajectory of the Thriving Kids initiative. While the intent to improve early intervention is commendable, the execution must be grounded in evidence, equity, and collaboration. More investment in mainstream and community services in addition to ongoing access to the NDIS and individualised supports is vital.
Respectfully,
Dr Nicole Sharp
BAppSc(Hons)OT, PhD
Director and Occupational Therapist
Allison Dodd
Bachelor of Occupational Therapy
Registered Occupational Therapist
Bree Barker
Play Therapist
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