There’s a version of Thriving Kids doing the rounds that goes something like this: from October, a wave of families will arrive holding government funding, looking for an OT or a speech pathologist or a psychologist, and the practices that are easiest to find will pick up the work.
It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong, and I say that as someone who wrote a version of it earlier this year.
The correction matters because the advice that follows from the tidy story sends practices in the wrong direction. If you build your preparation around being found by funded families, you’ll spend money on visibility that doesn’t convert and miss the thing that’s actually going to affect your business.
So here’s what the program is, where the money goes, and what’s genuinely worth doing.
What the program is
Thriving Kids is the first phase of Foundational Supports, backed by a joint Commonwealth and state investment of $4 billion over five years. It’s for children aged eight and under with developmental delay and/or autism who have low to moderate support needs, along with their families, carers and kin.
Children with permanent and significant disability, including those with high support needs, stay on the NDIS under the usual arrangements.
Services start rolling out no later than 1 October 2026, with full rollout by 1 January 2028. Allied health is explicitly part of the model. Under the targeted supports domain, the national model names group and one-on-one allied health delivered by occupational therapists, speech pathologists, physiotherapists, audiologists and psychologists.
That last point is why so many practice owners assumed this was a growth opportunity waiting to be captured. The professions are named. The money is real. The demand is obvious.
The part that gets skipped is how a child actually reaches a clinician.
Where the money actually goes
Families don’t receive Thriving Kids funding. There is no plan, no package, and no funding envelope a parent can take to a provider of their choosing.
The money flows from the Commonwealth to the states. At least $1.4 billion of the Australian Government’s $2 billion contribution goes as direct funding to states for Thriving Kids services, and the states commission and deliver from there. State and territory governments are responsible for delivering routine child development checks, general parenting supports, local navigation and targeted supports.
Access to the allied health component runs through what the national model calls nationally consistent functional needs identification and triage arrangements. In plain terms, a child is assessed and directed into a service. The family isn’t shopping.
New South Wales has published the most detail so far, and it’s instructive. DCJ is commissioning non-government organisations to deliver targeted supports, with access through a central intake process managed by the department. Private allied health professionals are engaged where there’s a temporary gap in a commissioned provider’s capacity, or where a specialisation is needed that the commissioned provider doesn’t have. DCJ has flagged it may establish a panel for private practitioners, with further information due in the second half of this year.
Read that again if you run a private paediatric practice in NSW. You are the contingency, not the default.
Other states are further behind. South Australia’s own factsheet confirms supports will be progressively stood up from October, but says the service model and mix of supports still require engagement with families, communities and providers, and that details on supports and timing will follow. If you’re in SA, nobody can tell you yet what your role is, because it hasn’t been designed.
The date that actually matters isn’t October
October 2026 is when services begin rolling out. It is not a cliff.
The date with teeth is 1 January 2028. That’s when changes to NDIS access arrangements for this cohort take effect. Children aged eight and under already enrolled in the NDIS before that date with low to moderate support needs will be reassessed against the eligibility criteria in place on 31 December 2027.
So the risk to your caseload isn’t a sudden October event. It’s a reassessment cycle roughly sixteen months out, at which point a portion of your NDIS-funded paediatric clients may no longer be NDIS-funded, and the alternative system they’re moved into may not include you.
That’s a slower problem than “get ready for October.” It’s also a much bigger one, and it’s the one worth planning around.
What’s actually worth doing
Three things, in order.
Work out how exposed you are. Go through your paediatric caseload and identify how many children are aged eight or under, funded through the NDIS, and would likely be assessed as low to moderate support needs. That number, as a share of your revenue, is your exposure. I’ve had conversations with practice owners who assumed it was a small slice and discovered it was closer to half. You can’t plan around a number you haven’t looked at.
Talk to your existing families. This was good advice before I understood the funding model properly, and it’s better advice now. Your clients are hearing fragments about Thriving Kids and most of them are getting it wrong in the same way the sector did. A family who believes they’re about to receive funding they won’t receive is a family in for a difficult surprise. Being the person who explains it clearly, without spin, is worth more than any campaign. Families who feel informed through a confusing transition tend to stay, and they tend to tell other parents.
Build the part of your practice that doesn’t depend on government funding. This is the real work. If a meaningful share of your caseload is exposed to the 2028 reassessment, and you may not be commissioned to deliver Thriving Kids services, then the commercially sound response is to reduce your dependence on a funding stream you don’t control.
That means building private-paying demand, and focusing on the cohorts that remain yours regardless: children with high support needs who stay on the NDIS, school-age children over eight, complex presentations, and families who want more than a commissioned system will provide. It also means the unglamorous fundamentals, because a practice with strong local search visibility and a well-maintained Google Business Profile is one that can generate its own enquiries rather than waiting for a system to send them.
None of that is Thriving Kids-specific. That’s the point. The practices that come through this well will be the ones that were already good at attracting their own clients.
If you want to pursue commissioned work
Some practices will want to be part of the commissioned system, as a lead provider, a subcontractor, or on a panel where one exists.
I’m not going to advise you on how to do that, because government procurement isn’t my field and there’s already too much confident guesswork circulating about this program. What I’d say is that the pathway is real, it’s state by state, and the only reliable information about it comes from your own state government rather than from consultants, agencies or LinkedIn.
Start with your state or territory’s Thriving Kids page, and with the Commonwealth’s service design and consultation page, which links through to each jurisdiction. If your state is still consulting, get into the consultation.
What not to publish
One thing to be careful about, because I’ve seen the advice given and I gave a version of it myself.
Don’t describe your practice as a Thriving Kids provider, and don’t advertise that you’re accepting Thriving Kids referrals, unless you have actually been commissioned to deliver Thriving Kids services. Not on your website, not in your Google Business Profile description, not in a Google Ads campaign.
For registered health practitioners that’s a claim about the services you provide that you can’t substantiate, made to families who are making a decision about their child’s care. It’s the sort of claim the advertising provisions of the National Law exist to catch, and it’s a poor look even setting compliance aside.
What you can do is explain the program honestly. There’s a genuine information vacuum here, and families are searching to understand what Thriving Kids is, how it differs from the NDIS, and whether their child will still get support. A clear, accurate page answering those questions, alongside a straight description of what your practice offers privately, is useful to families and it’s entirely defensible. Just keep the line clean between explaining a government program and claiming to be part of it.
The bottom line
Thriving Kids isn’t a wave of funded families heading for your door. It’s a restructure of how a large cohort of children will be funded and directed, and for most private paediatric practices it represents risk to an existing revenue stream rather than a new one to capture.
That’s a less exciting story than the one I told earlier this year. It’s also the one your business planning should be built on.
The practices I’d back through this are the ones that know their exposure, communicate honestly with the families they already have, and get seriously good at generating their own enquiries between now and 2028.
If you’d like to work out what that looks like for your practice specifically, where your exposure sits, where your enquiries currently come from, and what’s worth building first, that’s exactly what a Clinic Growth Diagnostic is for.