Being a parent of a child with learning or behaviour differences is exhausting in ways that are hard to describe unless you have lived it. You know your child deeply. You know what they are capable of. You spend enormous energy advocating for them, preparing them, supporting them through every school day, and you routinely do far more than parents of neurotypical children ever need to.

And then you get a call from school. Or a note home. Or you pick your child up and discover that while their classmates were outside at recess or at PE, your child was sitting inside. Because they were too slow to get organised.

If this has happened to your family, this post is for you.

We want to explain what executive function actually is and why children with autism, dyspraxia, ADHD, or learning differences often struggle with it profoundly, not through choice, but through neurology. We want to give you practical, evidence-informed strategies to share with your child’s school. And we want to give you a clear, confident roadmap for advocating for your child when a school’s response to their disability is punitive rather than supportive.

At TDT, we are available to support you in this advocacy. You do not have to navigate it alone.

If your child is being penalised at school for difficulties that are neurological in origin, TDT can help you understand what is happening and support you in responding. Book your free 30-minute phone consultation, available Mondays 3:30–4:30pm.

What Is Executive Function And Why Does It Fail Under Pressure?

Executive function is the collective term for the higher-order cognitive skills that allow us to plan, organise, initiate, monitor, and complete tasks. It is governed by the prefrontal cortex the front of the brain which is the last region to fully develop, typically not reaching maturity until the mid-twenties.

Executive functions include:

• Working memory: holding information in mind while using it at the same time
• Cognitive flexibility: shifting between tasks and tolerating unexpected change
• Inhibitory control: stopping an ongoing action and resisting distraction
• Task initiation: actually starting a task, particularly one that feels difficult or unclear
• Planning and organisation: identifying the steps a task requires and sequencing them correctly
• Emotional regulation: managing the feelings that arise in response to demands, errors, and frustration

Child and Adult playing with wooden blocks

For a child with autism, dyspraxia, ADHD, or a profile involving retained primitive reflexes or sensory processing differences, executive function is not simply slower to develop. It is actively disrupted by what is happening in the nervous system beneath it.

The prefrontal cortex, where executive function lives, is also the first part of the brain to go offline under stress. When a child’s nervous system is in a state of activation, from sensory overload, anxiety, the background interference of retained reflexes, or the cumulative effort of a school morning, the prefrontal cortex receives fewer resources. Executive function degrades precisely when it is most needed.

This is the neurological basis for what every parent of a neurodivergent child knows intuitively: their child can do things at home they cannot do at school, and things at school they cannot do at home. The executive function available to a child is not fixed, it depends entirely on the current state of their nervous system. A child who is dysregulated, sensory overloaded, or anxious has measurably less executive function available than the same child in a calm, safe, familiar environment. Punishing them for this is like punishing them for having a disability.

Understanding the Scenario: What ‘Getting Organised’ Actually Requires

The situation that prompted this post involves a child with diagnoses of autism and dyspraxia, a profile the TDT team knows well. His autism brings reduced visual and auditory processing and poor executive function. His dyspraxia affects his stamina, gross and fine motor coordination, and his ability to organise his body through sequences of movement and tasks.

What happened was this: he took too long to get organised in class. The consequence was that he was kept in for recess and lunch and missed PE that day.

Before we talk about how to respond to this, let us spend a moment genuinely understanding what “getting organised” requires for a child with this profile, because it is very different from what it requires for a neurotypical child.

Getting Organised Is a Complex, Demanding Task

Consider getting dressed in the morning, a task most adults complete in minutes without conscious thought. For a child with dyspraxia and executive function difficulties, this single task requires:

• Locating every item of clothing and knowing the correct order to put them on
• Holding the entire sequence in working memory while executing each physical step
• Coordinating the body precisely for each action, bending, pulling, fastening
• Blocking out environmental distractions while maintaining focus on the task
• Managing the sensory experience of each item, the resistance of socks, the feel of waistbands, the weight of shoes
• Regulating the frustration or anxiety that arises when steps are difficult or go wrong

Child putting on socks

Putting on socks alone is physically exhausting when you have low muscle tone. The sock resists. The foot must be held in position. The body must bend in a coordinated way and hold it there. For a child with dyspraxia this is not a small task, it is a significant physical and cognitive challenge before the school day has even begun.

Scale this up to packing up materials, knowing what activity comes next, transitioning between locations, knowing what to bring and where to go, all in a noisy, visually busy classroom, potentially with unclear instructions, potentially when already fatigued from a sensory demanding morning.

When this child appeared to be slow to get organised, what was actually happening was a child working as hard as they possibly can with the tools they have. Looking at what classmates were doing to orient himself. Staring out the window to gather his thoughts. Mechanically working through the steps because they do not come automatically for him. This is not disobedience. It is not laziness. It is a child navigating genuine neurological difficulty.

You might recognise this in your child: they can do each individual step of a task when shown, but cannot sequence and execute all steps independently. They appear ‘in their own world’ at transition times. They need significantly more time than peers for tasks that look simple. They fall apart when rushed or when an expected routine changes.

What Stress Does to the Learning Brain

When a child is under stress, including the stress of being singled out, kept inside while their peers go out to play, or made to feel that they have done something wrong, the amygdala (the brain’s threat detection centre) activates. As it does, the hippocampus (essential for memory and new learning) and the prefrontal cortex (executive function) receive fewer resources.

Clunky, degraded thinking develops rapidly under stress. The ability to follow instructions, recall information, make decisions, and execute tasks all deteriorate. Information encountered in a high-stress state is not efficiently stored and is often not accessible when needed later. For children with neurodevelopmental profiles, this stress-related cognitive shutdown happens faster, more severely, and takes longer to recover from than in neurotypical children.

Keeping a child in from recess, the one break in the school day specifically designed to provide the movement, fresh air, and social connection that regulation requires, and removing PE — the structured physical activity that provides proprioceptive input essential for nervous system regulation — does not address the underlying executive function difficulty. It adds stress, removes the very experiences that support regulation, and guarantees that the child will be less organised, not more, for the remainder of the day.

A child with low muscle tone specifically needs physical activity and movement breaks throughout the day, both to build muscle and to maintain the neurological regulation that sustained learning requires. Removing those breaks as a punitive consequence is not only clinically counterproductive. In the context of a diagnosed disability, it may constitute unlawful discrimination under Australian law.

What Actually Helps: 13 Classroom Strategies That Work

The following strategies are evidence-informed and appropriate for children with executive function difficulties, autism, dyspraxia, ADHD, and related profiles. They are not accommodations that lower expectations, they are reasonable adjustments that allow a child with a disability to access the curriculum on equal terms with their peers, which is precisely what Australian law requires.

These are worth sharing with your child’s teacher and documenting in a formal learning support plan.

1. Short writing tasks with regular breaks

Extended writing is disproportionately demanding for children with dyspraxia and working memory difficulties. Shorter tasks with achievable endpoints allow the child to experience completion and success. Regular movement breaks between tasks are not rewards, they are regulation tools that improve the quality of subsequent work. They should be built into the routine, not earned.

2. Teaching typing as an alternative to handwriting

For children whose fine motor difficulties make handwriting a significant barrier, typing is a reasonable adjustment that allows them to demonstrate knowledge without the disproportionate cognitive cost of handwriting. This does not replace handwriting development, it runs alongside it, ensuring the child can participate in the curriculum while motor skills continue to develop.

3. Fine motor activities to build strength and coordination

Structured craft and manipulation activities throughout the school day build the hand strength, bilateral coordination, and motor planning that underpin handwriting and daily task management. These work best when embedded into regular classroom activities rather than treated as separate special education activities.

4. Voice-to-text and assistive technology

Assistive technology, voice-to-text, text-to-speech, word prediction, digital organisation tools, reduces the physical and cognitive burden of written output and allows the child to demonstrate their thinking at the level their intellect is actually at, rather than the level their motor system permits.

5. Visual task sequences, written and pictorial

Visual schedules and task sequences displayed clearly in the classroom remove the working memory demand of holding step sequences in mind while executing them. For a child who cannot reliably retain a four-step verbal instruction, a visible task sequence is not a crutch, it is an essential accessibility tool equivalent to a ramp for a wheelchair user.

6. One instruction at a time

Multi-step verbal instructions are extremely challenging for children with auditory processing difficulties and poor working memory. One instruction, clearly delivered, with time to process and initiate before the next is given, is not slower overall, it is faster, because the child does not lose the thread partway through and need the full sequence repeated.

7. Consistent routines for packing up and transitioning

Consistent, predictable routines for packing materials away in the same order and location every time build procedural memory that eventually becomes automatic, reducing the cognitive load of transitions over time. Variability in these routines is disproportionately costly for children with executive function difficulties and should be minimised where possible.

8. Adapted writing materials

Wide-barrel pencils, pencil grips, lined paper with wider spacing, and grid paper all reduce the fine motor demand of writing and allow the child’s cognitive resources to focus on the content of the task rather than the mechanics of the tool. These are low-cost, high-impact adjustments.

9. Fill-in-the-missing-word for comprehension assessment

Testing comprehension through fill-in-the-blank formats separates the assessment of understanding from the assessment of written output. This allows the child’s actual comprehension to be evaluated independently of their writing difficulties, which is the appropriate assessment goal when the learning objective is comprehension, not writing mechanics.

10. Writing buddies and structured peer support

A trusted peer who can assist with task orientation, materials management, or written output reduces reliance on direct teacher support and builds social connection simultaneously. This works best when the peer relationship is genuinely positive and the role is not stigmatising for either child.

11. Movement breaks and heavy work throughout the day

Structured movement breaks, particularly heavy work activities involving resistance and proprioceptive input, support attention, reduce fatigue, and provide the nervous system regulation that children with sensory processing needs require to remain available for learning. These are clinical necessities for many neurodivergent children, not privileges to be earned or withdrawn.

12. Dot points accepted for written responses

Accepting dot-point responses rather than requiring full sentences and paragraphs for every written task allows the child to demonstrate knowledge without the disproportionate load of extended writing. Targets for extended writing can be built toward progressively rather than imposed as a universal baseline.

13. Visual demonstration and physical support in PE

In physical education, children with dyspraxia benefit from clear visual step-by-step demonstrations of activities and, where needed, physical prompting to support movement planning and initiation. PE should be an accessible, positive experience, not an additional arena of public difficulty for a child who is already working significantly harder than their peers in every other aspect of the school day.

Students making crafts in school

💡  These strategies are most effective when documented in a formal learning support plan and implemented consistently across all teachers and settings. A strategy used by one teacher but not others does not produce the consistency a neurodivergent child needs. Advocate for whole-school, whole-day implementation.

How to Advocate for Your Child: A Step-by-Step Guide

If your child has been penalised in a way that does not appropriately account for their disability, you have both moral and legal grounds to address it. Here is a clear, practical process.

  Step 1: Send the school your child’s reports by email

If you have a current professional report from a psychologist, paediatrician, occupational therapist, or specialist, email it to the class teacher with a delivery record. If you do not have a report, schools are still required to make reasonable adjustments, a report strengthens your position significantly but is not a legal prerequisite for receiving support.

  Step 2: Copy the Principal and Learning Support Coordinator

Send copies to the principal and the learning support coordinator (also called special education coordinator or inclusion coordinator depending on the school). This ensures the information is not solely the class teacher’s responsibility and that leadership is formally aware of your concerns.

  Step 3: Request a formal meeting

In the same email, formally request a meeting with the class teacher and learning support coordinator to discuss what accommodations need to be in place. Prepare your non-negotiables — the adjustments your child absolutely requires — and be clear about them. Bring documentation, bring notes, and bring a support person if it would help you feel more confident.

  Step 4: Ensure adjustments are documented in a formal learning plan

Accommodations agreed in the meeting must be documented in a formal learning support plan, called a Learning Plan, One Plan, or Individual Education Plan depending on school and state. In South Australia this is a legal document that must be signed by you. Once signed, the plan’s contents must be implemented. It is not optional.

💡  Read the plan carefully before signing. ‘The child will be supported with organisation’ is too vague to be enforced. ‘The teacher will display a visual task sequence at the start of each lesson’ is specific and enforceable. Insist on specificity.

  Step 5: Request that the meeting be formally minuted

Ask for written minutes of the meeting to be sent to you. Only confirm them as accurate if they correctly reflect what was agreed. Request corrections in writing before signing anything inaccurate.

  Step 6: Schedule a review meeting

Request a follow-up meeting within six to eight weeks to review whether accommodations are being implemented and producing the expected outcomes. This demonstrates you are monitoring the situation and prevents the plan from being filed and forgotten.

  Step 7: Know that you do not need a diagnosis

Australian schools are required to make reasonable adjustments for students with disability under the Disability Standards for Education 2005. A formal diagnosis strengthens your position but is not legally required, schools can and must make adjustments based on observed need. Provide specific information about what helps your child and why, even without a report.

If the School Does Not Respond Appropriately

If your initial efforts do not result in genuine change, a clear escalation pathway exists.

• Document every incident in writing, dates, what happened, who was involved, what the consequence was for your child. Specificity matters and contemporaneous records are far more powerful than recollections later
• Write to the principal outlining specific incidents and specific accommodations that were not implemented, with direct reference to the learning plan
• Escalate to the school council, particularly effective in private schools where the council has governance authority
• For SA government schools, contact the regional office of the Department for Education
• For independent schools, contact the Association of Independent Schools of South Australia
• If you believe discrimination on the basis of disability has occurred, contact the Australian Human Rights Commission or the SA Equal Opportunity Commission
• Contact the SA Disability Policy and Programs team at: education.dpp@sa.gov.au

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 makes it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the basis of disability in education. The Disability Standards for Education 2005 specify in detail how schools must meet this obligation, including the requirement to make reasonable adjustments and to consult families. Keeping a child with a disability in from recess or PE because of a difficulty that is a direct consequence of their disability may constitute discrimination under these instruments. You have the right to raise this formally, and TDT can support you in doing so.

The Legal Frameworks You Need to Know

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA)

Makes it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the basis of disability in education. Disabilities covered include intellectual, sensory, neurological, learning, and psychosocial disabilities, physical conditions, and chronic illness. Both permanent and temporary disabilities are covered.

The Disability Standards for Education 2005

Translate the DDA into specific, enforceable obligations for schools, covering enrolment, participation, curriculum, assessment, and support services. Require schools to make reasonable adjustments in consultation with students and families. Schools that do not comply are in breach of the legislation.

The NCCD (Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability)

An annual data collection that determines Commonwealth disability support funding allocations to schools. Students with a formal diagnosis attract automatic funding. Students without a diagnosis can still attract funding if the school collects appropriate evidence of need, meaning schools have both a legal and a financial incentive to identify and support students with disability. Parents can support this by providing specific information about what helps their child.

The Australian Education Act 2013

Governs how Commonwealth school funding is received and spent, establishing the accountability framework within which schools must demonstrate that disability funding is used appropriately.

💡  If a school tells you that funding limitations prevent them from making certain adjustments, refer them to their NCCD obligations. Schools correctly identifying and supporting students with disability should have access to appropriate funding. If they do not, that is a matter for the regional office.

How TDT Can Support You and Your Child

Navigating the school system on behalf of a neurodivergent child is one of the most demanding things a parent does, while also parenting, working, and managing the reality of a child who arrives home carrying the accumulated weight of a school day that is harder for them than it looks from the outside.

TDT is here to support you, not just clinically, but practically.

Emily’s neuroplasticity and reflex integration programs address the foundational nervous system issues that underlie executive function difficulties. When the neurological interference that makes organisation, working memory, and task initiation hard is addressed at its source, rather than managed at the surface, children often begin to manage more effectively in the classroom. Not because they were taught strategies, but because the system that was making the strategies inaccessible has become better organised.

We can also support you in understanding and articulating your child’s neurological profile in language that is useful in school conversations. And we are available to attend school meetings with families where our clinical understanding of a child’s presentation would provide useful context.

TDT is not only a therapy provider. We are advocates for our clients in every environment where they need support.

You can read more about the neurological foundations of executive function difficulties in our posts on the Taylor & Trott Pyramid of Learning, visual stress and processing, and why children are not lazy, they think differently. If school-based demand avoidance is also a factor, our post on understanding and supporting demand avoidance covers the specific strategies that work for these profiles in educational settings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my child need a formal diagnosis for the school to make adjustments?

No. Australian schools are required under the Disability Standards for Education 2005 to make reasonable adjustments based on observed need, not solely on the basis of a formal diagnosis. A diagnosis strengthens your position significantly and makes obligations harder to dispute, but it is not a legal prerequisite. Provide the school with specific, practical information about what your child needs and why.

What is a reasonable adjustment and how do I know if one applies?

A reasonable adjustment is a modification to the educational environment, curriculum, assessment, or support arrangements that allows a student with disability to participate on equal terms. It does not mean identical treatment, it means equitable access. Whether an adjustment is reasonable is assessed by reference to what is practicable, the benefit to the student, the cost, and the effect on others. Most of the strategies listed in this post fall well within the range of reasonable adjustments for children with autism, dyspraxia, and related profiles.

The school says they cannot afford extra support. What can I do?

Schools receive NCCD funding specifically for students with disability. Ask them specifically about their NCCD identification and reporting processes. Schools that are correctly identifying students with disability should have access to appropriate funding. If they are not meeting their obligations, the regional office of the relevant state education authority is the appropriate escalation point.

Can TDT attend school meetings with our family?

Yes. TDT is available to support families in school advocacy contexts, including attending meetings where our clinical understanding of a child’s profile would be useful. Contact us to discuss what support would best fit your situation.

My child’s difficulties seem connected to sensory processing. Is that relevant?

Very much so. Sensory processing difficulties and retained primitive reflexes are among the most significant contributors to executive function difficulties in the classroom. When the sensory system is overwhelmed or the nervous system is carrying retained reflex interference, the cognitive resources available for planning, organisation, and task initiation are dramatically reduced. Addressing these foundational issues often produces classroom improvements that strategies and accommodations alone cannot achieve.