Submission to the Inquiry into the Thriving Kids Initiative

SUBMISSION TO THE HOUSE STANDING COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, AGED CARE AND DISABILITY INQUIRY INTO THE THRIVING KIDS INITIATIVE

About Special Teaching and Research (STaR) Ltd.

Special Teaching and Research (STaR) Ltd (formerly STaR Inclusive Early Childhood Association) was founded in 2001 by Dr. Coral Kemp, parents, and professionals from Macquarie University Special Education Centre. Initially launched as a pilot program in 2002, STaR pioneered providing early intervention where it matters most- in regular early childhood education and care (ECEC) services, supporting early childhood educators to include children with disability or developmental delay. The pilot program has evolved and is now known as the Early Years Program (EYP). In 2020, STaR broadened its vision to include lifelong special education, addressing the lack of educational opportunities for adults with disabilities in post-school settings.

STaR’s Early Years Program (EYP)

The EYP has four core activities:
Families are supported to enrol their child with developmental delay/autism/disability at a local STaR-affiliated ECEC service. No diagnosis is required, and no Medicare card or visa status is needed. Additional services, including family workshops, information, advice, referral, and advocacy, help ensure ongoing, wrap-around support for the whole family.

Children with developmental delay/autism/disability have an Individual Learning Plan (ILP) that aligns with the family’s priorities, the Early Years Learning Framework, NDIS, and allied health/therapy goals. This plan is updated at least three times each year at a meeting with input from all stakeholders (ECEC educators, family, STaR Special Educator, and other professionals working with the child & family).

Educators at the STaR-affiliated ECEC service receive ongoing professional development, coaching and mentoring. During onsite coaching and mentoring visits, a Special Educator supports them to develop and implement the child’s ILP. ILPs serve as evidence of the ECEC service making “reasonable adjustments” under the Disability Discrimination Act (1992), so children with disability or developmental delay can participate on the same basis as their peers. An ILP is also a tool for reflection and improvement within the service. Qualified STaR Early Childhood Educators provide release time for the ECEC service educators, ensuring educator/child ratios are maintained to enable time off the floor.

A Transition to school program is provided in the year before school, including support for the school enrolment process, additional school orientation visits, and information sharing with the receiving school. Support for the family, school, and child in Term 1 & 2 of the school year is also provided.

Funding
The EYP is partially funded (approx. 20%) by the Australian Department of Social Services (DSS) under the Commonwealth’s ‘Families and Children’ program (CaPS). The other 80% of funding comes from fundraising, donations and philanthropy.

The EYP is delivered at NO COST to the family, their child or the STaR-affiliated ECEC service.
The normal fees of the ECEC service are payable by the family directly to the service.

Capacity building for the ECEC sector and families
In addition to our EYP, many educators and student teachers have attended STaR professional development courses and have been coached and mentored ‘on the ground’ by our Special Educators. Between 2018 and 2022, STaR delivered Sector Capacity Building support to educators and leaders in 20 inclusive preschools in the northwest of Sydney as part of the NSW Department of Education (DoE)’s Disability Inclusion Program. Since September 2021, over 3000 early childhood educators from early childhood services (including long day care, preschool & family day care settings) across NSW have attended STaR professional development webinars funded by the NSW DoE through the Sector Development Program. We also facilitate a weekly MyTime peer support group for parents and carers of children with a disability, chronic medical condition or developmental delay, on behalf of Playgroup NSW, and deliver Stepping Stones Triple P seminars.

Research
STaR is committed to embedding research evidence into our practice and contributing to the evidence base in early childhood intervention and special and inclusive education. Our team has published research in peer-reviewed academic journals and regularly presents at national and international conferences.

We believe that everyone, regardless of disability, has the right to learn in an environment and way that fosters their development, and our mission is to make quality special education accessible.

Contact:
Sarah Carlon, Head of Research and Special Education
Phone: 02 8850 1269
Email: sarah@star.org.au

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Introduction
Thank you for the opportunity to submit a response to the inquiry into the Thriving Kids initiative.

This submission primarily addresses two of the terms of reference by identifying gaps in workforce support and training required to deliver Thriving Kids (ToR 4), framed within the context of domestic and international policy and best practice (ToR 5) and the stories of families and community members who engage with our organisation. It includes recommendations to strengthen the capacity of the workforce and, in turn, the quality of early childhood intervention available to young children presenting with developmental concerns, regardless of diagnosis, and their families.

The Context
Best Practice in Early Childhood Intervention (ECI)
Domestically and internationally, it is widely acknowledged that Best Practice in ECI involves appropriately skilled practitioners working in a way that is strength-based, family-centred, collaborative, in the child and family’s natural environment/everyday settings, and focused on achieving outcomes for the child and their family through building the capacity of those in the child’s life to support the child’s development (Division for Early Childhood, 2016; Eurlyaid, 2019; Moore et al., 2025). Best practice guidelines for ECI practitioners were first released in Australia in 2016 (Early Childhood Intervention Australia, 2016). Despite being commissioned by the NDIS to support the rollout of the NDIS Early Childhood Early Intervention Approach, in both the independent review into the NDIS (Commonwealth of Australia, 2023) and the review of Best Practice in Early Childhood Intervention (Dimmock et al., 2024), families reported that they were not receiving ECI services in line with these guidelines.

The best practice guidelines (ECIA, 2016) were recently reviewed, and a new National Best Practice Framework for Early Childhood Intervention (Moore et al., 2025) has just been released. The framework provides guidance to ECI practitioners, families, mainstream education and family and children support services, and government and regulatory agencies. Like the original best practice guidelines (ECIA, 2016), compliance with this framework has not been mandated in any way. Although it includes descriptions of principles and practices, the framework does not include a set of quality standards or competencies required of the ECI workforce that would ensure they have the skills, knowledge and experience to apply these principles and practices. By comparison, the National Quality Framework for early childhood education and care was introduced in 2012 and includes not only approved learning frameworks, but also the National Quality Standards and, most importantly, laws and regulations.

Gaps in workforce support and training required to deliver Thriving Kids.
The mainstream early education workforce
In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness within the ECEC workforce that young children with disability and developmental delay have the right to learn alongside their peers in ECEC services. This has been supported by the inclusion of information about the Disability Discrimination Act (1992) and reasonable adjustments in the most recent version of the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (Australian Government Department of Education, 2022), and on the ACECQA website (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2025). This means that children with developmental delay are more likely to be enrolled in ECEC services; indeed, far fewer families are contacting us directly for assistance with placing their child with a disability or developmental delay in an ECEC service, although we do still hear stories of exclusion.

However, significantly more families, early childhood educators, and other concerned professionals are contacting us with requests to provide support to ECEC services that have children enrolled with a developmental delay (diagnosed or other). Early childhood educators tell us that they don’t know how to support the participation and learning of children with developmental delay. They feel nervous, stressed, and ill-prepared. They want to do the ‘right’ thing, but don’t know how to engage these children. They can sometimes receive conflicting advice from different ECI professionals, or struggle to link the allied health ‘therapy’ strategies to supporting the child’s engagement within their early learning setting. This is echoed in the perspectives of families of children with developmental delay and disability reflecting on inclusion in early childhood education reported by Dimmock et al. (2024).

We have also been approached by families who have felt pressured by early childhood educators to seek a diagnosis of developmental delay, ASD or ADHD for their child. ECEC service educators and leaders have reported that they need to show that the child has a diagnosis to access support through the National Inclusion Support Program, or that they believe if the child has a diagnosis, then the family could access NDIS support and, in turn, the service could benefit. STaR’s EYP operates in six ECEC services in the northwest of Sydney, and centre directors have reported that they feel relieved that a diagnosis is not needed for children and families to access the program. They also report that they value the capacity-building we offer their teams, with our special educators sharing and modelling strategies they can use to support any child now or in the future.

Similar programs, focusing on the capacity-building of educators in ECEC settings, exist in NSW but are not universally available. For example, community-based preschools in NSW have access to support through the Sector Capacity Building Program component of the NSW DoE’s Disability and Inclusion Program. This is a training and support program for preschool staff, delivered by ECI services, regardless of whether they have any children with disability or developmental delay currently enrolled in their preschool (see NSW DoE, 2025), but other types of ECEC services in NSW do not have access to similar support.

Recommendations:

• Provide ECEC services with access to capacity building support to include children with developmental delays, regardless of the service type, location of the service, or diagnosis (or lack thereof) of the children attending.
• Support ECEC leadership and educators to understand the National Best Practice Framework for ECI and how it relates to their work with children, families, and ECI practitioners.
• Require ECI professionals providing capacity building supports to ECEC services to demonstrate expertise in evidence-informed ECI practices, the ability to embed functional assessment and intervention strategies into a play-based ECEC setting, and competencies in providing collaborative consultation and coaching.
• Require ECI practitioners working in ECEC settings to work collaboratively with the ECEC educators and service leaders, and to embed any suggested strategies into the play-based early childhood curriculum.

Mainstream community health and family support services
Parents of children with developmental delays who came to the MyTime peer support group shared with the group and our team that despite attending other mainstream Playgroups and seeking help from mainstream health professionals, the first time they learned about the value of early childhood education for children with a developmental delay, or their child’s right to attend any local ECEC service, was at the MyTime group. Parents shared that they took their children to speech and occupational therapy in clinic weekly, where therapists worked with the child and did not ask about the home environment or offer to visit the home. One parent also shared with the group that she didn’t know why her child needed a KeyWorker, or what the KeyWorker did when she visited the house, but that she was told that she needed to have one by the NDIS-funded ECI provider. These stories demonstrate a lack of information about best practice in ECI being shared with families by mainstream community health and family support services, who are often the first point of contact for families of children with developmental delay.

Recommendations:

• Build the skills and knowledge of mainstream community health and family support providers so that they can provide evidence-informed information to families of children, in line with the principles and practices of the National Best Practice Framework for ECI.
• Provide easy-to-read and evidence-informed resources to families and the wider community about ECI best practice to support them to make informed decisions about services delivered under the Thriving Kids initiative and advocate for best practice.

The early childhood intervention workforce
As noted in the sections above, families and ECEC services have reported that they have not been receiving services in line with ECI best practice. It is therefore somewhat unsurprising that analysis of 246 online job advertisements for ECI positions across Australia, collected over a 5-month period, indicated that less than half of the providers advertising ECI positions required successful candidates to have knowledge, skills or experience aligning with the best practice guidelines available in Australia at the time (Gavidia-Payne et al., 2024). In addition, very few providers who included role descriptions encompassing best practice components required the successful candidates to have knowledge or skills in the corresponding area (Carlon et al., 2025). This indicates that the current Australian ECI workforce is likely to need significant support and training to empower them to deliver best practice ECI supports under the Thriving Kids Initiative.

In Australia, ECI services are provided by professionals from a wide range of disciplines (e.g., speech pathology, early childhood education, occupational therapy, special education, physiotherapy, psychology, developmental education). Each discipline’s professional body has its own unique standards, which do not necessarily encompass the competencies needed to work in ECI. In contrast, in the United States, cross-disciplinary competencies required for ECI have been identified by national professional organisations representing different disciplines. These competencies have been mapped to the standards or competency areas of their individual disciplines, ensuring that they are addressed in pre-service training and professional development of all practitioners across the ECI workforce (Early Childhood Personnel Center, 2020). This formed part of the comprehensive system of personnel development for the ECI workforce, undertaken by the Early Childhood Personnel Center, funded by the federal government to provide support and assistance to state ECI systems and higher education institutions (for details, see Bruder et al., 2021).

Guralinick and Bruder (2025) and the Division for Early Childhood (2024) both highlight the critical role of professionals with early childhood special instruction skills in teams providing ECI programs. These professionals have a thorough knowledge of child development, assessment and intervention, and how to integrate this information to gain a holistic view of the child. They have a family-centred philosophy, expertise specific to young children with delays or disabilities, and collaborative skills to facilitate partnerships with families, team members and ECEC services. In Australia, there is a shortage of early childhood specialist educators to fulfil these critical roles under the Thriving Kids Initiative, again highlighting the significant support and training needed.

Recommendations:

• Fund and implement ongoing professional development for ECI practitioners across disciplines to deliver evidence-informed, family-centred, capacity-building, and inclusive services in accordance with the National Best Practice Framework for ECI. This could include online resources and professional development modules similar to those provided by the ECTA Center in the US (https://ectacenter.org).
• Invest in national ECI workforce planning, with a focus on early childhood intervention specialist educators.
• Support the development of ECI-specific standards/competencies related to the National Best Practice Framework for ECI, and legislate compliance with these standards, similar to the National Quality Framework for ECEC.
• Embed the principles and practices from the National Best Practice Framework for ECI, and related professional standards/competencies in pre-service training across professional degrees in allied health, education and social sciences.
• Promote, fund and support interdisciplinary collaboration across ECI services.

Conclusion
The Thriving Kids Initiative provides the opportunity to ensure that young children with mild to moderate developmental delay, regardless of diagnosis, and their families receive evidence-informed best practice early childhood intervention (ECI) in their local communities. This can only be achieved with a well-prepared mainstream and specialist ECI workforce and a national approach to building, supporting, and maintaining the quality of this workforce.

STaR welcomes the opportunity to meet and discuss our recommendations with the House Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability, the Thriving Kids Advisory Group and other stakeholders.

Kind regards,
Dr Sarah Carlon
Head of Research and Special Education

References

Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority. (2025). Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) resources. Retrieved from: https://www.acecqa.gov.au/resources/disability-discrimination-act-1992-dda-resources

Australian Government Department of Education AGDE. Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (V2.0). Australian Government Department of Education for the Ministerial Council.

Bruder, M.B., Gundler, D., Stayton, V., & Kemp, P. (2021). The Early Childhood Personnel Center: Building Capacity to Improve Outcomes for Infants and Young Children with Disabilities and their Families. Infants and Young Children 34(2), 69-82. doi:10.1097/IYC.0000000000000191

Carlon, S., Zaunutini, J., Kemp, C., & Gavidia-Payne, S. (2025). Australian Early Childhood Intervention Roles: Are they Reflective of Best Practice and are the Skills, Knowledge, and Experience Sought by Employers Suitable? Infants and Young Children, 38(2), 87-106. Retrieved from: https://journals.lww.com/iycjournal/pages/collectiondetails.aspx?TopicalCollectionId=1

Commonwealth of Australia. (2023). Working together to deliver the NDIS: Independent review into the National Disability Insurance Scheme final report. Retrieved from https://www.ndisreview.gov.au/sites/default/files/resource/download/working-together-ndis-review-final-report.pdf

Dimmock, K., Rees, N., Kakoschke-Moore, S. (2024). Review of best practice in early childhood intervention: Consultation report from the Association for Children with a Disability. The University of Melbourne, funded by and provided to the Commonwealth of Australia’s Department of Social Services. Retrieved from: https://healthy-trajectories.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Review-of-Best-Practice-in-ECI_Findings-from-ACD-Consultation_v1.0_November-2024.pdf

Division for Early Childhood. (2016) DEC recommended practices with examples. Retrieved from https://www.dec-sped.org/recommendedpractices

Division for Early Childhood. (2024). Position Statement: The Role of Special Instruction in Early Intervention (Revised 2024). Retrieved from: https://divisionearlychildhood.egnyte.com/dl/gdcZuQFjyf

Early Childhood Intervention Australia. (2016). National Guidelines for Best Practice in Early Childhood Intervention. Retrieved from: https://www.eciavic.org.au/resources/eci-best-practice-guidelines

Early Childhood Personnel Center. (2020). Cross-Disciplinary Competencies. Retrieved from: https://ecpcta.org/cross-disciplinary-competencies/

Eurlyaid- The European Association on Early Childhood Intervention. (2019) Recommended Practices in Early Childhood Intervention: A Guidebook for Professionals. Retrieved from: https://www.eurlyaid.eu/eciguidebook-englishversion/

Gavidia-Payne, S., Zanutinni, J., Carlon, S., & Kemp, C. (2024). Early Childhood Intervention under the National Disability Insurance Scheme: Characteristics and Recruitment Practices of Service Providers. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-024-01759-w

Guralnick, M.J., & Bruder, M.B. (2025). Inclusion in preschool as a catalyst to enhance the quality of comprehensive community-based early childhood programs Infants and Young Children, 28(4), 262-279. Retrieved from: https://journals.lww.com/iycjournal/fulltext/2025/10000/inclusion_in_preschool_as_a_catalyst_to_enhance.2.aspx

Moore, T., Imms, C., Luscombe, D., SNAICC authors, Bonydady, B., Dimmock, K., Deane, K., D’Aprano, A., & Kafoschke-Moore, S. (2025). National Best Practice Framework for Early Childhood Intervention. The University of Melbourne. Commissioned by the Commonwealth of Australia’s Department of Social Services. Retrieved from: https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-09/national-best-practice-framework-for-early-childhood-intervention.pdf

NSW Department of Education. (2025). Disability and Inclusion Program. Retrieved from https://education.nsw.gov.au/early-childhood-education/operating-an-early-childhood-education-service/grants-and-funded-programs/disability-and-inclusion-program