The first day of school is a milestone that looms large in every parent’s mind. For parents of children with additional needs, this transition can feel particularly momentous – filled with both hope and apprehension. Will the teachers understand my child? How will my child cope with the new routines and expectations? Will they make friends? Will they be supported properly?
When my child started school, I remember standing at the school gate with a knot in my stomach that felt like it might never unravel. We had prepared extensively – visits to the school, meetings with teachers, social stories, practising with the uniform – yet I still wondered if we had done enough. Would our carefully constructed supports hold up in this new environment?
The reality is that school transition doesn’t happen in a single day or week. It’s an ongoing process that unfolds over months and even years. It’s about building relationships, establishing routines, navigating new social landscapes and creating systems that support your child’s unique way of learning and being in the world.
This chapter explores how to navigate this significant transition, from the practical preparations before day one to managing the everyday realities of school life. While the journey may not always be smooth, with the right approach and supports, mainstream schooling can offer rich opportunities for growth, learning and connection for your child.
Trust and collaboration
Your child’s success at school is determined by the quality of the relationship between you and their teacher, and that journey starts even before your child’s first day of school. As Andrew Oberthur explains in his book, Are You Ready for School?, the most important people in a child’s life are their parents and their teacher – since they spend most of their waking hours with these people. He explains that the key to a child’s successful educational journey is having a parent-teacher relationship built around a culture of trust, collaboration and enquiry.
Parents need to trust the teachers and the school to provide high-quality education in a safe environment. In short, teachers stand in loco parentis (in place of a parent). Oberthur quotes Hendersen and Berla (1994) and explains:
The most accurate predictor of a student’s achievement in school is not income or social status but the extent to which that student’s family is able to create a home environment that encourages learning; express high (but not unrealistic) expectations for their children’s achievement and future careers; and, become involved in their children’s education at school and in the community.
Having a child with additional needs or a disability means you are going to have to trust the teachers and school, and get involved and informed. Read the newsletters, attend the parent-teacher meetings, do the funding reviews, sign all the paperwork. You need to be heavily involved in your child’s education even before day one.
Foundation transition
The transition process starts the moment you find out where your child will be attending school. Every time you mention the school’s name to your family or talk about how your child will be going to school, you are engaging in the transition process.
Before my child started school, I consumed all the content I could about starting school. I found numerous books for neurotypical kids and a bit of specialist literature and webinars from the disability associations. There are heaps of good information and checklists out there already.
The school transition days are great, but they happen in November, and it is a long time between then and when the school year starts in early February.
Some of the things that helped us:
- Getting our child’s school uniform early and trying it out, including him wearing it on transition days. Cutting off the labels and prewashing everything. Labelling every item with our child’s name. Focusing on supporting our child to try on and try out everything. We wanted to develop as much routine as possible early on.
- The primary school teacher who was going to be teaching our son’s class visited both of his kindergartens and met his current educators. She observed our son before he started school, and also chatted to his kinder teachers, so she knew what to expect. The more information the school has on your child, the better the transition will be. If the school doesn’t suggest this for your child, ask for it. I did take the approach of eyes wide open. The more information the school had about our child, including his interests, his strengths and his needs, the more they did to support us.
- Getting pictures of the school, teacher/s, aides and staff and explaining all of this to our child in a social story (more on this in the next section). The more pictures you have of the child’s school experience – their classroom, friends, where to line up and so on – the easier the transition will go. We create a social story before the end of each year of schooling to prepare our child for the transition to summer holidays and then the return to school. We continually update the social story before school returns as we have more details such as the class he will be in, his teacher and which of his friends will be in that class.
- Visiting the school on the weekend before school returns. This gives our son a chance to play in the playgrounds and check out all the little differences at the school from the year
before, without the pressure of other people being present. The buildings are not open, but being on school grounds allows our son to start getting comfortable in the space again. - Visiting our classroom teacher the day before school returns. This only takes ten minutes but makes a huge difference to the year. We get an opportunity to see the classroom quietly and reconnect with the teacher after the long summer holidays. This also allows me to give the teacher a quick update on how the holidays were and where my child is at.
- Getting to know the rules and helping our child to understand them. There are lots of rules at school. Some of them will make sense to your child but others won’t. Schools also have a lot of implicit or informal rules, which our children sometimes miss. Help your child work these out so they know the lay of the land at school.
Over the years I have learned to clearly ask for things we need – for example, the ten-minute visit with the teacher the day before school starts, speech therapy starting as soon as possible and so on. I ask in advance and follow up, as people are human and do forget. These small things make a huge difference in the transition each year, so we prioritise them.
Learning new rules and routines
School is full of new routines. There is more to learn than you think. By the time our children even get into the classroom each morning they have had to follow hundreds of little rules.
Consider the tasks our children must complete and rules they need to follow between the car and the classroom each morning:
- Get out of car.
- Put on backpack.
- Line up for the crossing, but don’t press the button – the crossing supervisor has to do that.
- Say good morning to the crossing supervisor.
- Walk on the left side of the path.
- Let bigger kids and those riding bikes and scooters pass on the right.
- Put backpack down in one place during summer months and a different place during winter months.
- Say good morning to the teacher.
- Say hello to friends.
- Listen out for the bell.
- Line up with the class.
- Enter the classroom via a specific route.
What a test of their executive functioning skills before they even get to the classroom!
Some of these routines and rules play to a child’s advantage, while others are very hard for children to follow.
Rules and routines also change. Just when you think you have one down pat, the season changes and the rules change again.
We find one of the best ways to impart the school rules and routines is via social stories. The more personalised, the better. Social stories are short, personalised narratives created for children with additional needs, especially those with autism or developmental delays. They use clear, straightforward language to show and explain social situations, expected behaviours and experiences. These help children understand and feel prepared for situations and scenarios they might face. By breaking down social rules and expectations into bite-sized pieces of information, social stories help reduce worry, build confidence and develop important social skills. These stories work best when they include pictures or visual supports that show children exactly what to expect in different situations. We have created social stories for a variety of things: keeping with the group, toileting at school, keeping shoes and clothes on, movingup a grade, athletics day, mid-year change of teacher, illness, pregnancies, new therapists, swimming lessons, the school production, school excursions and more.
The more these activities are repeated the better our child gets at them and the more photos we can use for the social story next time.
All these rules and routines impact our child, though, and there is a build-up over time. By the end of the school day our little one is done. By the end of the school term, again he is done. By the end of the year, oh my, we are all done.
He is over people telling him what to do. The noise. The rules.
He is done.
Cognitive load
Cognitive load theory, developed by John Sweller, helps us understand how children process information in the classroom. The theory explains that our working memory has a limited capacity, typically holding only four to seven pieces of information at once. Students with learning difficulties can often hold fewer pieces of information, or process things more slowly. This means they are starting with less available cognitive space
before even beginning to tackle learning tasks.
For students with learning difficulties, their cognitive load is frequently at capacity due to the extra mental effort required for tasks that other students might find automatic. For example, a student with dyslexia uses significant cognitive resources just to decode text, leaving less capacity for comprehending the meaning, while a child with ADHD may use considerable mental energy filtering out classroom distractions, reducing their available resources for learning new content.
This understanding helps explain why our children often experience fatigue more quickly, may struggle with multi-step instructions or find it challenging to engage with complex learning tasks. They reach their cognitive load threshold more quickly due to their additional processing demands.
When starting school, cognitive load is intensified as children must simultaneously process unfamiliar routines, new social dynamics, different expectations and learning. For children with learning difficulties, this transition period requires significantly more time and support, as their already taxed cognitive resources are further stretched by the sheer volume of new information. As the years go by we have seen this again and again for our child at the start of each new year and at the end of each term. Recognising this heightened cognitive demand is essential for creating supportive transitions that allow all children, especially those with additional needs, to adjust to school life.
Time to adjust
Starting school takes time for our children. Time to settle in. Time to learn the routines and understand the rules. Time to learn names and faces. Time to process all the new things. Foundation is hard. There’s so much to learn every day, and so many new experiences.
We did very little on the rest day during Term 1, choosing to spend quiet time at home. But the term went fast and before we knew it, the school week shifted to five days.
Keep in mind that your child might not be able to do the full five days, and that’s okay. You can choose to pick them up early any day you want, or when you think they need it. Don’t feel bad about doing this. This is not forever, and these sorts of arrangements can change term to term depending on your child. They will need time to settle in. It might even take a year.
Everything takes time within a school, too. It takes a lot of time (and emails) to start speech pathology and OT. It takes time to sort out issues. It takes time for things to resolve.
As we navigate school routines, it’s worth considering different frameworks for understanding time itself. The concept of ‘crip time’ from disability studies offers valuable perspective here. It acknowledges that disabled people experience time differently.
For our children, this might mean recognising that development follows its own timeline, not the standardised schedules of traditional schooling.
Embracing crip time means valuing your child’s unique pace and understanding that their timeline for adapting to school life deserves respect and accommodation. It’s not about ‘falling behind’ but about honouring each child’s individual journey.
Sickness
I cannot talk about the first year of school (or any year of school, actually) without discussing sickness. Get ready for it. We have had everything: lice; gastro; Covid; respiratory syncytial virus; school sores (impetigo); whooping cough.
Not only do our children, who sometimes have complex health needs, seem to catch everything, so do we as parents. School contains so many new germs. All I can suggest is couch and doona days with the iPad for the children.
In good news, the amount of sickness does lessen over the years once your child has already caught most of the bugs going around.
We find Term 3 particularly hard every year. The shine of the start of the year has gone. It is germ central in every classroom. It is cold and everyone is tired. So, I sometimes pick up my child at lunchtime on a Friday. It took me a good couple of years for a classroom teacher to say to me I can just pick him up when I want, and I don’t have to feel bad about it. Once she had given me permission I felt much better doing it.
Toileting
Yes, I am going there.
Many children with disabilities are not independent at toileting by the time they get to school. No matter what we tried, we weren’t ready. It was hard and embarrassing for my child and us, however it is a fact of parenting children with additional needs.
Don’t be embarrassed.
Schools have a duty of care to support students with disabilities in their toileting needs, but this must be properly planned, documented and carried out by appropriately trained staff. While teachers cannot provide intimate personal care such as wiping, schools typically employ Student Learning Support Officers (SLSOs) or teacher’s aides who have specific training in personal care support. These staff members must have appropriate qualifications and Working with Children Checks in place. Two trained staff must be present for intimate care tasks.
All care provided must be documented and specific times are usually scheduled for toileting support, along with procedures for unscheduled needs. The school should work with the family and OT to create a detailed personal care plan that outlines the student’s needs, required support and specific procedures, while respecting the student’s dignity and independence. The personal care plan should document practical considerations and how to promote independence where possible. For children who need toileting support (such as help with buttons, or supervision) but not intimate care, different procedures might apply – but these still need to be clearly documented and carried out by appropriate staff.
While some schools might ask parents to provide intimate care themselves if trained staff aren’t available, this isn’t a long-term solution – and there is a chance your child will be at that school for seven years. Keep working on it, as both the school and you need your child to work towards independence in these skills.
Don’t forget: schools have an obligation under disability legislation to provide appropriate support and reasonable adjustments for students with disabilities, including personal care needs.
Chapter summary
- Starting school is all about trust. Building solid relationships with teachers and getting involved right from the start sets everyone up for success.
- Give transition plenty of time. Start months before school begins with social stories, uniforms and quiet visits to get familiar with the space.
- Children with additional needs have a huge amount to process each day – even just following the morning routine from car to class takes heaps of mental energy. Expect them to be exhausted at the end of each day.
- School germs are real. Be ready for lots of sick days in that first year and don’t feel bad about early pick-ups when it all gets too much.
- Supporting children with toileting and personal care requires careful planning. Work with the school to sort out a solid plan that works for everyone.
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Buy Mainstream Primary Schooling Your Special-Needs Child by Alicia Cohen here.
