Adolescents with severe behavioural needs are too often treated as beyond help. As suspensions rise and specialist provision narrows, Australia’s public education system risks abandoning them when support matters most.

For most of a 40-year career working with adolescents with severe behavioural disability, I kept asking the same question: why was so much more specialist provision directed towards children in primary school than those in secondary school? The answer was delivered as though it settled the matter. Early intervention is more effective. By adolescence, it is too late, too hard or too expensive to make the difference that counts.

I concede that early intervention is preferable. It can prevent suffering before failure becomes an identity. What I reject is the conclusion that adolescents whose needs persist, or whose dysfunction first becomes visible with puberty, are somehow a poorer investment. That is not a clinical conclusion. It is a budget choice disguised as inevitability.

Adolescence is not simply late childhood. Puberty changes the body, brain and social world. Peer acceptance assumes enormous importance, while earlier trauma can re-emerge. Some young people who managed primary school begin to unravel only then. Others reach secondary school with serious needs already identified but lose the small, structured setting that allowed them to function. Their disability has not disappeared. The provision has.

For years I watched the frequency and severity of violence in secondary schools climb, only to see the claim dismissed as anecdote. The department has now supplied the evidence itself.

Its 2025 dataset records 81,094 suspensions involving 42,015 students. Secondary students were suspended at a rate of 10.4 per cent, more than four times the primary rate of 2.3 per cent. Among Aboriginal secondary students the rate was 24.2 per cent; among secondary students receiving significant disability adjustments, 23.1 per cent.

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