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Every year, sometime in late January, prep teachers all over Australia meet their new class for the very first time. And every single year, without fail, the gap between the most ready child in that room and the least ready one is bigger than most people outside education would ever guess. It's not about who the smartest kids are. It is not really about which families did the most prep work at home. School readiness is messier than that, and far more layered. And it's the teachers, OTs and speec …

A Year 1 teacher once said something to me that stuck: “He can read every word on the page, but he still can’t hear that cat and bat rhyme.” She’d been turning it over for weeks. His decoding was fine. His comprehension was fine. Something underneath just wasn’t holding up, and she couldn’t quite name what. That something, it turned out, is phonological awareness. And once you get your head around what it actually is, a lot of what you see in early readers sta …

It was a Tuesday morning. Math lesson, mid-session. A Year 3 boy, a bright kid who generally gets on well, flipped his chair, burst into tears, and sprinted out of the room. His teacher hadn't raised her voice. Nothing had happened, as far as anyone could tell. The rest of the class just sat there. Something had pushed him past his limit. Maybe a comment from the kid next to him. Maybe the noise of the room is building up over time. Maybe something had happened at home that morning that nobody a …

Auditory Processing Disorder in the Classroom: A Practical Guide for Australian Teachers and Speech Therapists There is a student in your class. She sits near the front. She tries hard. She is not rude, not distracted by her phone, not disinterested. But she consistently misses the second half of your instructions, gets confused when two things are said quickly, and looks blank when the rest of the class seems to understand. She does not have a hearing problem. Her ears work perfectly fine. What …

Pragmatic Language Skills: Why Some Kids Say All the Right Words But Still Can’t Connect He was seven. Smart kid, read well above his level, could rattle off dinosaur names all day, and could hold his own in a conversation with an adult. But at lunch, the other kids kept their distance. Group projects were a mess. He talked over people, missed the moment when someone wanted to change the subject, and laughed at the wrong times. Teachers liked him fine. The kids his own age found him exhaus …