Thriving Kids is coming. What does that mean for educators?

The federal government’s new Thriving Kids initiative is about to shift significant responsibility into schools. Teacher organisations are right to flag it. Here’s an honest look at what’s happening, and what can help schools and teachers with the transition and new approach.

A big shift is underway

In August 2025, the Australian Government announced Thriving Kids — a $4 billion national initiative (funded by the Federal Government and States and Territories) designed to build a new system of early support for children aged eight and under with developmental delay or autism who have low to moderate support needs. It is one of the most significant changes to how Australia identifies and supports children with developmental concerns in a generation.

In December 2025, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability released its report on the initiative — titled No Child Left Behind. The report draws on submissions, public hearings and community surveys, and sets out sixteen recommendations to guide how Thriving Kids is designed and delivered.

The full report is available at https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Health_Aged_Care_and_Disability/ThrivingKidsinitiative/Report_into_the_Thriving_Kids_initiative

The detail is still being worked out. But the directions are clear. And for educators, several of those directions land squarely in the classroom.

Teacher organisations and others in the education sector have already begun raising concerns — and rightly so. The concern, broadly, is this: a system that previously allowed schools to refer children into the NDIS for identification, diagnosis and therapeutic intervention is shifting. Under Thriving Kids, more of that identification and early response is expected to happen in schools, by educators. That’s a significant change in what’s being asked of the teaching profession. And it deserves to be looked at honestly, not glossed over.

That’s what I want to focus on in this post.

What Thriving Kids is — and isn’t

Thriving Kids is not a replacement for the NDIS. Children with permanent and significant disabilities will continue to be supported through the National Disability Insurance Scheme as before.

What Thriving Kids aims to do is create a parallel pathway — a national system of supports for children whose developmental needs are real, but who currently fall through the cracks. These children often face fragmented services, unclear referral pathways, and loss of support at key transition points — entering early childhood education, moving into primary school, and progressing to secondary education (Recommendation 12). Many are either missed entirely, or funnelled into an NDIS system that was never designed for their level of need.

Thriving Kids is intended to identify these children earlier and support them in the “everyday settings where they already live, learn and play.” That phrase — everyday settings — is doing a lot of heavy lifting and work in this policy space. The settings the report keeps returning to are homes, community services, early childhood education centres, and schools.

But, that’s complicated! Schools and early childhood education centres as everyday settings sounds straightforward. In practice, it’s not. The report talks about schools as places where allied health delivers services, and as sites where educators identify developmental concerns and initiate referrals. But those are two very different things requiring two very different kinds of knowledge.

And here’s what often gets lost: teachers’ work is about teaching and learning, not clinical identification. Teachers are already managing diverse learning needs for up to 30 students, delivering curriculum, and assessing learning outcomes. What they need is knowledge and processes that support that work — not an added clinical or diagnostic role. They need to understand how neurodevelopment affects learning. They need to recognize when physiology and neurobiology is getting in the way of learning success. They need approaches and frameworks that help them adjust their teaching and know when to refer appropriately. But, they don’t need to become therapists.

The directions the report is pointing toward

The parliamentary report doesn’t lay out a finished blueprint. What it does do is identify several clear directions that Thriving Kids is likely to move in. Two of those directions have significant implications for what’s being asked of educators.

Schools as identification and delivery sites. The report is explicit that schools are not just a place where children receive education — they are settings where developmental supports should be actively delivered. Allied health professionals such as occupational therapists and speech pathologists are expected to work in schools under this model, bringing clinical support into educational environments. This moves the realm of developmental support from clinics into schools. For regional and rural communities especially, this shift is significant and has been identified in the report.

Teachers in the identification loop. One of the more consequential recommendations (Recommendation 15) is the proposal to include early childhood educators — alongside GPs, paediatricians and allied health professionals — as people who can initiate referral into the Thriving Kids system. The report envisions a single portal of entry with multiple referral pathways for children with developmental concerns (Recommendation 9). This is a formal recognition at policy level of something many educators have long understood: the adults who spend the most time with young children are often the first to notice when something isn’t quite right.

But here, again, is where it gets complicated. Noticing that something is “off” and knowing what is off — or, more particularly, what to do about it to support learning— are two very different things. Most teachers have not been equipped with the neurodevelopmental knowledge they need to navigate this area confidently — not just in identification, but in addressing and supporting the needs of children with developmental delays in a classroom context.

What this actually means in practice — and why it’s harder than it sounds

Let’s be direct. The directions Thriving Kids is heading toward are, in principle, sound. Early identification is important. Delivering support in the settings where children already are makes sense. But principle and practice are different things — and the gap between them is where teachers are about to find themselves.

The identification piece is harder than “just noticing.” Yes, early identification starts with observation. But observation without a knowledge base is just guessing. To meaningfully notice that a child’s motor development, sensory processing or social engagement is outside the expected range — and to understand how that’s affecting their learning — requires an understanding of neurodevelopment. How the brain and body develop together. What neurodevelopmental sequences look like and work together. What it means when neurodevelopment is delayed or immature. And crucially, what the implications are for teaching and learning in a classroom with 30 students.

Most teachers have not been given that knowledge. It’s not in standard teacher training. And, although incredibly useful for good pedagogic practice, it wasn’t needed in the same way as it will be if educators are part of the primary pathway for identification and intervention.

Teachers are already expected to understand and respond to diverse learning needs — it's good teaching practice embedded in the Australian Teaching Standards, inclusive education practice, and broader frameworks around children's rights. But the knowledge base that makes that expectation realistic — an understanding of neurodevelopment and how it affects learning — has not been a core part of teacher training. Teachers need neurodevelopmental literacy for teaching purposes — not to become diagnosticians, but to understand what's happening when a child struggles and how to adjust their practice accordingly. I’m not just referring to educational neuroscience it’s neurodevelopment and how the body trains the brain and creates the foundations for learning.

Thriving Kids is about to make that gap impossible to ignore.

What’s still to come — and the window of opportunity

It’s important to be clear about where things stand right now. Thriving Kids is still in its design phase. The parliamentary report’s recommendations are being considered by the government — they are not yet confirmed policy.  According to the Advice on national model for Thriving Kids, released on February 3^rd 2026 by The Hon Mark Butler MP, the rollout is expected to begin on 1 October 2026, with full implementation by 1 January 2028.

That means there is still time, but not a lot of it, if educators are going to be well prepared for dealing with the changes and implications at the classroom level. The questions that matter most for schools — what training and support will educators actually receive, how referral pathways will work in practice, what schools will be expected to provide versus what the system will fund — are still being worked out.

There’s no guarantee the answers will be timely or detailed enough to prepare teachers and schools for what’s ahead. Waiting for the policy to be finalised before starting to build that understanding is a risk. The learning challenges and student difficulties in classrooms exist now and educators need to know how to respond with a neurodevelopmental approach.

The knowledge base required to support educators and schools in addressing the learning challenges of these children exists.

The professional development frameworks exist.

The question is whether schools and educators engage with them now or wait until the pressure intensifies.

So what actually helps?

Real professional learning that makes a difference in the classroom and schools. Professional learning that builds capability, not just awareness. What helps is understanding why neurodevelopment matters for learning, how to observe a child through that lens, and what it means when the developmental picture presents challenges for that child’s learning success.

That’s not a clinical skill. It’s a teaching skill. It’s neurodevelopmental knowledge in service of teaching and learning — grounded in science, aligned with the Australian Teaching Standards, and focused on what teachers actually need to do their work well in delivering the curriculum. It’s the kind of knowledge that makes the difference between an educator who can recognize when physiology is getting in the way of learning and adjust their practice accordingly, versus one who is simply hoping for the best and addressing the behavioural presentations rather than possible contributory factors.

Body to Brain Learning was built around this gap — not as a response to Thriving Kids, but because the gap between neurodevelopmental knowledge and classroom practice has been there for a long time. Thriving Kids is simply going to make it impossible to ignore.

Body to Brain Learning offers professional development for educators grounded in neurodevelopmental science. Visit bodytobrainlearning.com to learn more.