Out where the dust settles slowly, our kids are asked to fit systems that were never built for them

WORDS: Dee van Heerden PHOTOGRAPHY Supplied

The sun rises slowly over Wiradjuri Country, and dust hangs in the paddocks before the heat burns it off. In town, utes line up outside the bakery, and parents pack school bags with the hope that today will be easier than yesterday.

In regional New South Wales, Chantelle Ryan has spent two decades watching a schooling system and seeing how many children fall through the cracks because they do not have the tools or support needed to adapt to the rigidity of the mainstream education system. A proud Dubbo local and mother of nine, Ryan co-founded Spear & Arrow Therapeutic and Wiluray Gunyah to support the families who are too far out to access care easily. She saw kids who were misunderstood being pushed aside, and families were sitting on waitlists for months, sometimes years. The help they needed either didn’t exist or wasn’t built in a way that made sense for their lives.

When looking for ways to bridge this gap, she also looked into the challenges that popped up most often. For example, the term ‘complex’ appears frequently in funding applications to the NDIS and in case reviews. So frequently, Ryan questioned how it is applied.

“A child who runs from a noisy room is responding logically to overwhelm,” she says. “A child who refuses a task they cannot manage is protecting themselves, but it is easiest for the adult in the room to simply label them as ‘complex’. When the caregivers are stretched too thin, it is easy to see why this makes sense, but not going deeper is a disservice to the child.”

“Labelling without contextual analysis can shift focus away from system design, but that is unfair. The problem doesn’t lie with the children; it lies with a system that is too narrow to fit the spectrum of development that different children from different homes may go through and need support through,” Chantelle explains.

“In regional areas, where services are stretched, children described as complex may struggle to access appropriate multidisciplinary care. Behaviour is information,” she says.

“If we treat it as disobedience, we miss the message, and we lose the child.”

The message is usually that the child’s nervous system is not coping, and the culprit could be any number of things. This is why children need to have that individual connection with a teacher, someone who can lean in and interpret the child’s cues.

“We often see sensory load, relational safety, predictable routines and adult regulation being involved in this process. In regional communities, staff shortages and resource constraints are a major struggle, which makes it even more difficult to stabilise a classroom full of children who each have unique needs, especially without coordinated effort and where there aren’t enough hands on deck.”

The National Disability Insurance Scheme was designed as a lifeline, but even so, for regional families, having a child with additional needs is harder because of the distance and isolation. It’s full-time, administrative, demands compassion and drains your patience. It’s also sleepless nights, tears, and the hope of small progress steps, all while trying to create a sense of safety and calm for this child.

“Parents are expected to be advocates, coordinators and experts while holding everything together at home, while raising other children and earning an income”, Chantelle says. “That is too much to ask of anyone.”

Spear & Arrow’s response has been to build an integrated, multidisciplinary model under one roof in Dubbo. Behaviour support, occupational therapy and group programs operate as a connected team rather than separate silos. Through Wiluray Gunyah, which means Sweet Home in the Wiradjuri language, the organisation also provides respite care in a dedicated house, a place that is warm and familiar rather than clinical.

Wiluray Gunyah is the response to the direct conversations Ryan had with families who said they needed somewhere their children could stay without feeling institutionalised.

“Families told us they were desperate for a break that didn’t feel cold or clinical,” Ryan says.

“So we built it. Workforce shortages remain one of the greatest pressures in regional health and disability services. Developing local talent rather than waiting for specialists to relocate from metropolitan areas was the best way to bring relief. We also created mentoring opportunities and set up leadership development to support our training programs so that we can create careers in the bush that are viable, people need work, and the local economy needs support.

“Regional areas struggle to attract and keep qualified staff,” Ryan says. “We decided to grow our own. We invest in local people so they can build careers here, not feel they have to leave for the city.”

The broader question is whether the larger systems will learn from what regional communities have known all along: when you build with culture and context at the centre, children do not have to fight so hard to be understood.