Thriving Kids: A Turning Point for Australian Autism, or a Step Too Far?

It’s a Tuesday morning in outer-ring Melbourne. A boy of seven—let’s call him Jack—is in the kitchen with his mum while she makes his lunch. Jack has autism and ADHD. He struggles with sensory overload, finds transitions between activities agonizing, and has difficulty with social communication. Right now, his NDIS plan pays for twice-weekly occupational therapy, speech pathology support, and a behaviour coach who helps him navigate school days. His mum, exhausted and grateful, has spent two years fighting for the funding that keeps him steady. From 1 October 2026, children like Jack—those under eight with autism or developmental delay and “low to moderate” support needs—will begin a transition out of the NDIS into a new system called Thriving Kids. For families currently on the scheme, that means reassessment is coming. And no one can yet tell her what that will mean for Jack’s future.

This is not a hypothetical worry. It is the lived experience that families across Australia will face as the government’s $4 billion Thriving Kids program begins rolling out over the next eighteen months, with a planned full transition by 1 January 2028. For children aged eight and under with autism and developmental delay classified as having “low to moderate” support needs, the shift is coming. And for families whose children carry both an autism diagnosis and ADHD—a group now known as AuDHD—the stakes feel especially high.

The NDIS and What Comes After

For most of the past decade, families supporting children with disabilities have anchored their lives to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The NDIS, imperfect as it is, offers an individual funding model: a child receives a plan tailored to their needs, reviewed annually, portable across states and service providers. A parent can choose their therapists, their approaches, their timing. There is accountability to the scheme itself. There is, theoretically, protection.

Thriving Kids is not the NDIS. It is a parallel system, designed to catch children with “low to moderate” support needs before they might ever reach the NDIS door. The vision, on paper, is generous: allied health services—occupational therapy, speech pathology, psychology, physiotherapy—delivered in homes, early learning settings, and schools. New Medicare items will fund these services. Parenting programs and peer networks will sit alongside clinical supports. Most radically, a child will not need a formal autism or ADHD diagnosis to access help. Early identification, early intervention, no gatekeeping.

For some families, this promise is real. A parent struggling to navigate NDIS queues might find relief in a faster Medicare pathway. A regional early learning centre, starved of specialist support, might suddenly have access to an occupational therapist. The program’s ambition—to catch development early, to prevent the need for intensive later support—is sound public health thinking.

Yet the promise and the reality are not yet aligned. And for AuDHD families, the gap between them is widening.

The Complication: What “Mild to Moderate” Actually Means

Here is where the story grows complicated. The government’s decision to move children with “low to moderate” support needs out of the NDIS rests on a classification that, according to disability advocates and autism experts, has no clinical basis whatsoever. Autism and ADHD are not diagnosed along a spectrum of “mild to moderate” to “severe.” The diagnostic manuals—the DSM-5, the ICD-11—describe autism in terms of support levels: level 1 (requiring support), level 2 (requiring substantial support), level 3 (requiring very substantial support). But a child at level 1 can have profound communication differences, intense sensory needs, or severe anxiety. A level 2 child might have high intellectual capacity but need total support with daily living. The classifications describe different kinds of need, not a linear severity scale.

When policy makers use “mild to moderate” to sort children, they are not using a diagnostic category. They are using a political construction—one that autism advocacy organisations Amaze and Yellow Ladybugs have been explicit in calling out: mild is not a clinical term. It has no diagnostic basis. It is a policy construction invented to create a population that can be moved off a scheme without the government having to say it is removing disabled people from disability support.

A survey of families affected by the transition found that 81 per cent of children had autism and 60 per cent had ADHD. Many have both. AuDHD children are, proportionally, disproportionately affected by this move. Yet there is no evidence that children with co-occurring autism and ADHD have “lower” support needs than children with autism alone. If anything, the interaction between the two conditions—the sensory sensitivities of autism layered with the impulse control challenges of ADHD, the executive function deficits that can cascade between them—often demands more sophisticated support, not less.

A December 2025 parliamentary inquiry titled No Child Left Behind laid bare the community’s alarm. The inquiry found that disability representative organisations had been largely absent from the co-design of Thriving Kids. It called for genuine consultation, strong safeguards, and a staged approach so that no child loses access to support. Yet as the October rollout approaches, many of those voices report that little has changed. They are not at the table. Their expertise is not being sought. Their concerns are being treated as obstacles rather than wisdom.

And then there are the questions no one has yet answered. What will services under Thriving Kids actually look like compared to an NDIS plan? If a child needed ten hours of occupational therapy per week under the NDIS, and Medicare items fund only four, what happens to the gap? Who ensures continuity when a child turns nine and ages out of Thriving Kids? What happens to children whose needs grow more complex over time? Is there a pathway back to the NDIS, or are they stranded in a system that was never designed for them?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that Jack’s mum is asking. They are the questions that every AuDHD family in Australia should be asking right now.

What Advocates Want, and What Families Can Do

The Australian Autism Alliance, Amaze, Yellow Ladybugs, and other organisations representing disabled people and their families are not opposed to Thriving Kids in principle. Early intervention, when it is genuine and well-designed, saves lives and creates possibility. What they are calling for is honesty: about what is being lost, about what co-design actually requires, and about the specific risks that AuDHD children face.

They are asking for public service agreements between the federal government and each state and territory, spelling out what Thriving Kids services will include, how they will be funded, and how they will be monitored. They are asking for a genuine transition plan—not a cliff edge. They are asking for representation from disabled people and their families in the final design and rollout. They are asking for a commitment that the NDIS will remain available to any child whose needs are not met by the new system, without additional bureaucratic barriers.

For families like Jack’s, the moment to act is now. Document your child’s current NDIS plan and the services it funds. Understand what you may be moving into, and what you might lose. Connect with your state disability advocacy organisation. Make submissions to your elected representatives. Ask your child’s clinicians what they think about the transition, and what they will do if therapy hours are cut. The rollout begins in six months. The time for visibility, for pressure, for ensuring that this transition happens with genuine safeguards, is not ending—but it is running short.

The Reframe

Thriving Kids is being presented as an efficiency measure, a way to free up NDIS funding for children with the highest needs. It is also being presented as a gift: better access, faster identification, earlier help. Both stories are true. And both are incomplete.

What is also true is this: the Australian government is making a massive structural change to how it supports disabled children, largely out of public view, with inadequate co-design and persistent uncertainty about outcomes. The families most affected by that change—the AuDHD families whose children sit in the transition zone—deserve more than a promise. They deserve transparency, partnership, and a genuine safeguard that no child will be left worse off than they were before.

Jack’s mum cannot undo October 2026. But she can ensure that her voice, and Jack’s needs, are heard before it arrives. So can every other family in this country. The question is not whether Thriving Kids will proceed. It is whether it will proceed with us—or without us.

Sources

Department of Health: Thriving Kids · SBS News: Thriving Kids — The Plan to Move Children with Autism and Developmental Delays Off NDIS · Bridgette Hamstead: Australia’s “Thriving Kids” Is Being Sold as Early Support. The Autistic Community Is Calling It What It Is: An NDIS Gutting. · The Conversation: Thriving Kids Could Help Secure the Future of the NDIS · The Conversation: If Parents Designed the New Thriving Kids Program, It’d Look Like This · UNSW Newsroom: What Do We Know About Thriving Kids? · Aspect: Thriving Kids · PMC/NCBI: Unmet Needs and Service Priorities for ADHD in Australia