Brilliant Little Gems - PDA Education & Consulting

I'll say it louder for those in the back 📣

Building resilience should never mean helping a child better tolerate an environment that isn’t working for them.

Enough with the 'but how will they cope in the 'real world' and 'we need to build their resilience'.

In reality, what we do with this approach is drive anxiety underground, increase the likelihood of burnout and contribute to long term suffering due to poor self-esteem and an identity built around barely surviving an environment - whilst watching others seemingly cruise through.

The goal should always be about the adults trying to understand enough of the young persons' experience that they can demonstrate care and compassion and adjust the environment so they feel safe and supported.

Because from a human-affirming, psychological and neurobiological perspective, safety and support aren’t the opposite of resilience. They’re the conditions that allow it to develop.

What are your thoughts?

Brilliant insights, hard earned wisdom & resonant shares from the incredible School Can't Australia team & community 🌈

There's still a few tickets left for this event - if you're in the Central Victoria region I'd love to see you there!

Family-friendly event:
Neurodivergence, PDA and school attendance support

We’re excited to invite families to a welcoming, supportive and non-judgemental event designed for parents, carers and children.

This is a wonderful opportunity to connect with other parents and carers, share experiences, and hear practical strategies for supporting young people who may be experiencing challenges with school attendance.

We’re delighted to welcome Sarah Middleton, an AuDHD social worker, as our guest speaker. Sarah will present on Neurodivergence and Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), with a focus on navigating and advocating within the education system.

👧 Children are very welcome to attend. Craft activities and other engaging options will be available for children who would prefer not to sit through the presentation.

☕ After the short presentation, families are invited to enjoy light refreshments and spend time connecting with one another.

Places are limited to help keep the event comfortable and relaxed, so please book early to avoid missing out.

We look forward to seeing you there! 💛
https://events.humanitix.com/neurodivergence-pda-and-the-classroom

I’m so looking forward to this! 💎 I’ll be facilitating a workshop on Day 2: Supporting PDA Through the Nervous System.

You’ll map your own nervous system across the day in this hands-on PDA toolkit, where demand avoidance and distress are understood as nervous system states, not behaviour to manage.

You know that moment when a PDA child's nervous system is flooding, and everything we were taught to do and say seems to escalate things further (or cause withdrawal)?

Emotion coaching is one of the most powerful tools we have for meeting big feelings without triggering demand avoidance. But it requires a slightly different approach than the traditional emotion coaching (which I trained teachers in many years ago).

I've created a double sided PDF with scripts, simple explanations, and the why behind what works with PDA nervous systems. It's designed for parents, teachers, and practitioners who want language that lands and an approach that supports development of interoceptive awareness, builds emotional literacy, grows capacity for self-regulation and self-advocacy and places relational safety at the heart.

I’ve had lots of beautiful feedback about how this resource makes a seemingly complex concept so accessible; and how effective it’s been in supporting regulation and communication with children (not just those with a PDA profile)!

If you work with demand-avoidant children (or support the adults around them), this is for you.

This resource is Neurodiversity Affirming because it allows flexibility in the approach to meet the child where they are at, is low-demand with no ‘right’ way for this to flow. It recognises that all feelings and thoughts are valid - and teaches compassion and acceptance.

https://brilliantlittlegems.com.au/resources -dUD2hl5VOB

One of the biggest challenges I see in schools is how many new ideas get introduced without considering how they fit within the bigger picture.

We’re often trying to fit new PDA-informed approaches into existing systems without a framework to hold it all together. It becomes a square peg, round hole situation. It just doesn’t work.

For example, we introduce Declarative Language, but we’re still using whole-class reward systems. One reduces demand, the other increases it. The maths just isn’t adding up.

This is just one example of how we can reduce demands in one context, while unintentionally increasing them in another.
Everyone is doing their best, but without a shared way of understanding what’s happening, it can start to feel like a game of whack-a-mole. New issues keep popping up.

That’s exhausting, especially for the brilliant educators and allied health professionals working so incredibly hard to make a real difference.

Through almost two decades of working with schools and families, and within education itself, I kept seeing the same challenge. That’s why I created The Complete Toolkit for Supporting PDA at School.

It brings together the framework, practical guidance, planning templates, case examples and the tools I use when working alongside schools, helping teams build shared understanding and create practical, sustainable plans.
Because I genuinely believe this.

Supporting children starts with supporting the adults.

When adults have a shared framework, children are far more likely to experience consistency, safety and success.

If you’d like to take a look, you’ll find it here 👉🏻 https://brilliantlittlegems.com.au/completepdatoolkitforschool

I'm excited to be speaking at the Neurodiversity Affirming (Un)Conference, and I'd love you there.

It's two days of lived-experience led learning for professionals who support neurodivergent children, online on 19th and 20th August 2026. Recordings of Day 1 sessions are also available for those who can't attend live.

I'm running a workshop on Day 2, Supporting PDA through the nervous system, a hands-on toolkit for supporting PDA (Persistent Drive for Autonomy, a.k.a Pathological Demand Avoidance) at school, where a child's demand-avoidance and distress are understood as nervous system states, not behaviour to manage or compliance to enforce. You'll get full permission to feel how you are feeling, show up with the nervous system you have in any given moment, and utilise this as a tool for connection and support with all children.

Head to https://neurodiversityunconference.com to learn more and register. See you there!