By Nicole Rinehart
The national debate around NDIS policy and funding is not just about balancing the budget.
Children's lives are at stake if we get this wrong, so it is imperative that we take a long term view of what it means for children to thrive.
The Federal Government this week announced major changes to eligibility requirements for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which will result in about 160,000 people transitioning out of the scheme.
Many of these will be children with Autism, who will transition to the new Thriving Kids program.
The direction of Thriving Kids is exactly right.
Right now, too many NDIS-funded therapies happen in clinics during school hours.
Children miss peer connection and learning, parents, mostly mothers, step out of the workforce, and costs escalate through fragmented, high cost one-to-one services.
Shifting supports into schools, playgroups and community settings isn't a cut to services, it's a smarter way to deliver them.
Children develop best through play with peers and side-by-side learning, not in clinic rooms.
The evidence is clear on what happens when children miss out on school, on connection to people, place and purpose, and on the brain development and mental health benefits that flow from those experiences.
Once children are disconnected in the primary school years, they are set on a pathway of lifelong comorbidity.
The data should stop us in our tracks.
Children and young people with disability already face dramatically worse health outcomes than their peers, including rates of depression and anxiety three to four times higher than the general population, and a mortality rate 4.7 times higher across the lifespan.
These are not inevitable outcomes.
They are the consequences of systems that fail to support children early, in the right places, in the right ways.
As a landmark study published this year in JAMA Pediatrics found: "Young people with intellectual disability and/or cerebral palsy had significantly higher mortality rates compared with the general population for most causes of death. Females with autism and co-occurring intellectual disability also experienced higher mortality. Public health and healthcare strategies could help prevent disparities in mortality associated with developmental disabilities".
Getting early support right isn't just about helping children thrive.
It's a matter of life and death.
The vulnerabilities driving these outcomes are well understood: barriers to school and community participation, social isolation, exposure to negative life events, and low self-esteem.
These are not clinical problems solved in clinic rooms.
They are problems of belonging, solved in classrooms, playgrounds, sporting clubs and community settings.
We also know that participation in organised sport and the arts does something profound.
It builds children's brains.
The evidence is clear that physical activity and creative participation improve not only quality of life but the developing minds of children with disability.
Typically developing children get this for free, every weekend, in every community across the country.
Through programs like AllPlay Footy, AllPlay Dance and AllPlay Learn, we have spent years doing the hard work of clearing the path, equipping coaches, teachers and community organisations with the tools to make that ordinary life accessible to every child.
It is time that access became the rule, not the exception.
Thriving Kids has the potential to make this real at scale.
But its success will depend on implementation that keeps children connected to school, to peers and to community and that measures success not by how many children are diverted from the NDIS, but by how many children with disability get to live, learn and play where all the other children are.
It is time we cleared the path so children of all abilities can live an ordinary life, in our communities, on our dance floors, on our football ovals, and in our classrooms, right alongside everyone else.
