4 online sessions (Zoom)
Wednesday evenings (7-9 pm)
From Aug 19 to Sept 9.

Please register interest here: tinyurl.com/schoolchildrenparents

Sponsored by CCS Disability Action Waikato. In partnership with PHCL.

Now & Next School

Support your child’s wellbeing and develop strengths-based learning goals in partnership with educators. The model promotes coaching children in the art of making the right choices and including them in planning with professionals as soon as possible. As understanding grows over the years, they become more confident and capable of taking control of their life’s direction. The parent’s role gradually changes from coach to consultant.

Facilitated by parent peer workers who are raising a child with a disability and trained to support families

Now & Next School is for parents, family members and primary carers of primary school-aged children—or those transitioning to school—who have a disability, developmental delay, are neurodivergent or if there are concerns about their development.

Launched in 2019

Our Child’s Voice model encourages your child to participate in planning supports as they grow to become independent young adults. Coach your child to gain independence as they grow up!

Parents testimonials

Launched in 2019, piloted in New Zealand, Canada and Australia, it emerged from demand from the parents who graduated from Early Years as they children grew and entered school.

Who is the program suitable for?

Families, carers, parents of primary school-aged children.
Seeking positive support and guidance in formulating a life vision.
Families raising children with ASD/neurodiversity, cognitive/learning disabilities and ADHD.
Families from immigrant background.
Parents and carers with neurodiversity, cognitive or learning differences and ADHD.

Now&Next At School overview: Your Child's Journey to Choice and Independence

Every choice you hand your child today is a step toward the independence you want for them. At School makes that handover intentional, by using unique bespoke Guides, built on your child and family's strengths.

Starting point: Reflect on where your child is at now and receive your tailored Choice Report, a printable guide to coach you in practising everyday choices you'll offer your child. From there, each session builds on the last.
Discover your child's strengths and use them to understand how to build goals that your child will achieve.
Learn about our wellbeing model and receive your child's first simple individual Wellbeing Plan, a printable individual guide on how to grow your child's wellbeing through achieving goals.
Transform wellbeing activities and receive your tailored Goal-Builder Guide, with clear steps for you at home and for their teacher at school. The guide is sent to your inbox, ready to print before attending your child's next school meeting — so you and their teacher are working from the same page.

Three individual, tailored reports. One journey. A path to your child's voice and independence.

Now&Next At School Contents of the 4 sessions

NOW & NEXT

A Learning Journey from Choice to Goals

NOW & NEXT is a parent learning program built on a simple but profound idea: raising a child toward independence is really a slow, deliberate handover of choice and control. Every skill a child develops, every decision they're trusted to make, is a choice their parent has learned to let go of. NOW & NEXT gives parents of children with additional needs a structured, four-session pathway for making that handover intentional — and it does something most parent programs don't: it turns each parent's own reflections into two personalized, tailored reports that guide and evidence their progress.

The Starting Point: Two Inverted Triangles

The program opens with a single image that reframes how parents think about parenting: two inverted triangles, one for Choice and Control, one for Child Voice. At birth, the triangle of parental choice and control is wide — parents decide almost everything — while the triangle of child voice is narrow. As the child grows, the triangles invert: parental control tapers down and the child's voice widens, until, ideally, an eighteen-year-old is the one steering their own life. NOW & NEXT names this shift explicitly and asks parents to see it not as something that happens to them, but as something they can shape, session by session, choice by choice. The program's guiding vision, repeated across the journey, is direct: “We want independence and control for our children when 18.”

The Choice Report: Where the Journey Begins

Before the first session, parents complete an online reflection form about where their child currently stands — what choices are already offered, where control still sits firmly with the parent, and what feels hardest to let go of. That form generates a Choice Report: a personalized, printable document that becomes each parent's field guide for the program. It's designed to be used, not filed away — parents bring it into Session 1, use it to name the very first new choice they'll hand to their child that week (the program calls this “becoming a Choice Agent”), and return to it as choices expand: a choice of storybook before bed, a choice of shirt colour, a choice built into a daily routine. The Choice Report anchors the start of the journey in each family's actual starting point, not a generic script.

The Learning Path

From there, the four sessions build on each other in a deliberate sequence, and each one opens with a short self-reflection check-in and closes with feedback, so the program is continuously calibrated to how parents are actually doing — not just what was taught.

Session 1 — Child Voice & Choice. Introduces the concept of child voice and the choice-and-control model, sets a group culture for the cohort, and coaches parents through practical strategies for offering choice in daily life. Parents leave with their Choice Report in hand and a single commitment: one new choice to offer their child in the coming week.

Session 2 — Strengths & First Steps. Opens with parents reflecting on how that new choice landed — what it did for their child, and for the family. The focus then shifts to identifying the child's Signature Strengths and learning a strengths-based coaching approach: make the good, see the good, link the good, remember the good. Parents use these strengths to shape a first, measurable step toward a goal their child cares about, and begin thinking about how to share that thinking with their child's teacher.

Session 3 — Wellbeing. Continues the reflection cycle, then widens the lens from single choices and single goals to the child's overall wellbeing, using the PERMA framework — Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. Parents build a wellbeing plan, choosing one component to model for their child and defining a concrete next step, which they're encouraged to share both at home and with school through an optional “Wellbeing Warriors” extension project.

Session 4 — Goal Building. Closes the loop. Parents reflect on the wellbeing-plan action they took, then move into structured goal-setting: naming the child's goal or dream, establishing a baseline, identifying which of the child's strengths can be harnessed, and brainstorming first steps. Each goal is broken down from a long-term vision into a first step and a sequence of next steps — and each step is split in two: a Partnership Next Step, owned by the teacher or school, and a DIY/Family Next Step, owned by the parent at home. This structure is what makes the final session different from a typical closing recap: it produces a shared, actionable plan built for two people to carry out together, alongside direct coaching on how to communicate that plan to a teacher.

The Goal Builder Report: Where the Journey Arrives

That final structure becomes the Goal Builder Report — a tailored document sent directly to each parent's inbox, built from everything they've worked through across the four sessions. Framed in the program as an “IEP secret weapon,” it functions as a dashboard: one child goal, one baseline, one set of strengths to draw on, and a clear split between what happens at school and what happens at home. Because it separates Partnership Next Steps from DIY/Family Next Steps, it's designed to be handed straight to a teacher and used in real IEP planning conversations — parents leave the program not just with insight, but with a document built to open a genuine collaboration with their child's school.

Lasting positive change for your child and family

Now & Next at School is facilitated by trained parent peer workers with lived experience in raising a child with a disability or developmental delay. By learning through shared experience and connecting with other families, the program complements the therapists and professionals you work with, to deliver great outcomes.

A child’s voice is a phrase describing an authentic involvement of children in their life decisions to become independent young adults. Teaching children to recognise and use this is one of the most important roles for parents. For example, we start with familiar ideas such as buying food or choosing clothes to wear and increase complexity as they get older. However, research has found that it is hard for children with disabilities to have their opinions heard when it comes to planning services and support. It happens to many children in schools, too.

Parents’ opinions are usually included in developing learning plans with professionals, but without the child’s participation, they may inadvertently set goals that do not use the child’s strengths and interests for the best outcomes. It’s never too early to start giving children opportunities to make choices.

Developing a Child Voice model

In response to this gap between policy and practice, Plumtree CEO Sylvana Mahmic and Plumtree Learning Research Director Dr Annick Janson have developed an evidence-based Child Voice model. It draws from their lived experience as a parent raising a child with disability.

The model promotes coaching children in the art of making the right choices and including them in planning with professionals as soon as possible. As understanding grows over the years, they become more confident and capable of taking control of their life’s direction. The parent’s role gradually changes from coach to consultant.

Support from professionals

The initiatives were acknowledged at a symposium that brought together Australian and international academics, researchers, parents of children with a disability, and professionals from early intervention and disability support services.

According to Associate Professor Peggy Kern of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Positive Psychology, amplifying the voices of children combined with the Now & Next program’s notion of family empowerment could inform changes to the NDIS in the future.

Why This Is an Innovation

Most parent programs end with takeaways parents have to translate into action on their own. NOW & NEXT ends with 3 unique reports:

The Choice Report captures where a family is starting from and what they're ready to let go of.
The Wellbeing Report captures where the child is at from their wellbeing perspective and coaches the parent to formulate goals that will improve their child's wellbeing.
The Goal Builder Report captures where they're headed and exactly how a teacher and a parent will get there together.

Together, they turn a group learning experience into individualised learning experiences, generated from each parent's own reflections rather than a generic template, and designed to keep doing work long after the last session ends: one report at the start of the journey, one at its destination, with four sessions of choice, strengths, and wellbeing learning connecting them.

Want to talk to a parent peer worker about the programme or have any other questions? Contact Dr. Annick Janson. For more info and impact studies, click here.

For all questions and registrations in Australia, contact Eram.