Aa
  • Read, Watch, Listen
  • TJI Series
  • Community Action
  • Events
  • Zedi
Follow us and continue the conversation
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • FaceBook
  • X
  • YouTube
Test yourself with the TJI Quiz!

Adjust size of text

Aa

Follow us and continue the conversation

  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • FaceBook
  • X
  • YouTube

Your saved articles

You haven't saved any articles

What are you looking for?

Original reporting, insightful analysis and diverse views, delivered straight to your inbox

  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • FaceBook
  • X
  • YouTube
Your support fuels our mission to inform, entertain and inspire.

The Jewish Independent is bound by the Standards of Practice of the Australian Press Council. If you believe the Standards may have been breached, you may approach The Jewish Independent or make a complaint to the Australian Press Council in writing at www.presscouncil.org.au. The Council may also be contacted on 1800 025 712.

  • Our Story
  • Contact us
  • Our Team
  • Support us
  • Guidelines
  • Pitch your idea
  • Republishing us
  • Community Action
  • Our Awards
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • FaceBook
  • X
  • YouTube
Aboriginal FlagTorres Strait Islanders Flag

The Jewish Independent acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and strive to honour their rich history of storytelling in our work and mission.

© The Jewish Independent 2026All Rights Reserved
Website design and development by Your Creative, MelbourneTerms & ConditionsPrivacy Policy
HomeRead, Watch, ListenAustralia
OpinionAustraliaZedi

Neurodivergent children are being quietly excluded from our schools 

Jewish schools boast that every child deserves a Jewish education but when inclusion becomes difficult parents are told their child is ‘not the right fit’.
A parent
Print this
Article Image

(Image: TJI)

Published: 27 January 2026

Last updated: 17 February 2026

For thousands of years, Jewish life has been built on the idea that “all of Israel is responsible for one another”. 

That ethic has travelled with us across centuries and continents to the many excellent welfare organisations we have in our community. 

This commitment to seeing and holding those at the margins sits at the heart of who we are as a community.  

But the experience I have observed of neurodivergent children in Melbourne's Jewish day schools is a gap in our communal care that deserves attention. 

I have watched distress be labelled as defiance. I have seen shutdowns reframed as refusal, and sensory overload treated as misbehaviour or rudeness

The first time a Jewish school told me they could no longer meet my neurodivergent child's needs, it was framed as concern. The second time, it was framed as capacity. By the third time, I understood what was happening as the conversation quietly shifted from how to support a child to how to manage an exit: exclusion.  

What makes this especially confronting is how it begins. Families are welcomed under the promise that a Jewish child deserves a Jewish education. They are reassured with values statements and glossy brochures about care and inclusion. 

But over time, belonging becomes conditional. You can stay if your child can comply. If they can regulate. If they can be quiet. If they do not disrupt the system. 

And when inclusion collapses the moment that a child becomes "too hard," it isn't inclusion at all. 

This is not a fringe issue or the experience of a handful of families. Repeatedly, I have seen neurodivergent children quietly pushed out of Jewish day schools across Melbourne, not through formal exclusion, but through a process that wears families down slowly and painfully. 

Exclusion by attrition allows schools to preserve their reputation while families absorb the harm 

I have watched distress be labelled as defiance. I have seen shutdowns reframed as refusal, and sensory overload treated as misbehaviour or rudeness. Support plans exist on paper but collapse the moment things get hard. Eventually, families are told gently, politely, but devastatingly, that the school is "not the right fit." 

I have learned, both personally and professionally, that meaningful inclusion requires written policies, clear accountability structures, specialist-informed practice, staff training, and defined pathways for support when complexity increases.  

Exclusion by attrition allows schools to preserve their reputation while families absorb the harm. For children and teenagers that harm includes internalised shame, anxiety and disengagement. For parents it is exhaustion, self-doubt, the scramble for alternatives, and grieving. 

They do not just lose a school. They lose community, identity, and a sense of belonging they believed was unconditional. 

Jewish day schools are not merely educational institutions. They are cultural, spiritual, and communal anchors. When neurodivergent children are excluded either formally or quietly, they are being told that there is no room for their full selves in Jewish communal life. 

Since October 7, and again following the Bondi attack, Jewish families have been forced to look inward for safety, continuity, and solidarity. Trust in the outside world has been shaken. Community has never mattered more. 

For families who are pushed out of Jewish schools now, the burden is compounded. They are not simply searching for alternative education. They are frightened. 

Inclusion fails not because schools lack resources, but because it is rarely funded or prioritised with the same urgency and strategic intent as buildings and capital works. 

Schools are driven by compliance-based models and reputation management that are failing our children. 

If Jewish education in Melbourne cannot hold its most vulnerable students at a time when our community itself feels under threat, then it is a moral failure.  

I do not doubt that schools care deeply, work hard, and feel stretched. But leadership is not measured by effort. It is measured by outcomes, especially for those who are the most vulnerable. 

School leaders should ask themselves whether their school has a clear, documented, consistently applied framework that ensures decisions affecting neurodivergent students are fair, lawful, and reviewable, rather than situational, relational, and opaque. 

Silence, ambiguity, and discretion feel easier in the short term, but they are costly in the long term not just for families but for staff and for school values. The lessons children learn from being educated alongside neurodivergent peers such as empathy, flexibility, humanity, and justice, matter.  

Schools routinely make sophisticated decisions about staffing, timetabling, compliance. Complexity is not new to school leaders. 

What is new and confronting is being asked to apply that same sophistication to children whose needs do not align neatly with existing structures. 

Before pressuring a family to leave, leaders might consider not, "Did we mean well?" but "Would we stand by this decision if required to explain it formally, transparently, and in writing?" 

Our community has built systems of care for the vulnerable for generations. The question is whether we are willing to extend that same responsibility to neurodivergent children in our schools. 

You might also like
  • ‘Our children already belong’: Petition calls Jewish schools to cooperate for disabled support
    Gideon Cohen
  • Planned non-Zionist Jewish school part of a growing US trend
    Shira Li Bartov
  • Neurodivergence and inclusion in the Jcom
    The Jewish Independent
logomark.67a07ee3
We believe in the free flow of information

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, by using our Creative Commons licence

You might also like

    Isabelle oderberg
    NewsAustralia

    ‘The Jewish Independent’ commentary makes finals in Walkley journalism awards

    The Jewish Independent 1
    Zoe Better pillars of light crop
    FeatureAustralia

    NDIS changes threaten disabled participation in community life

    Jarod Rhine-Davis
    Jewish cemetery
    NewsAustralia

    Melbourne Chevra Kadisha implicitly recognises LGBTQ+ families

    Jarod Rhine-Davis 1

About the author

A parent

The author is a parent of neurodiverse children who attend a Melbourne Jewish school, a practitioner specialising in trauma, and an advocate for other families. TJI has agreed to publish this article anonymously to avoid identifying her children.