Australia has formally endorsed inclusive education through international and national policy commitments aligned with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and related education frameworks (United Nations, 2006; UNESCO, 2009). Yet these commitments coexist with a diversified schooling system in which mainstream, special, and segregated provisions operate in parallel. Within this landscape, parents of children with disability are positioned as primary navigators of inclusion, required to interpret policy, negotiate support, and make consequential schooling decisions. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 27 Australian parents who had moved their children between mainstream and special settings, this paper conceptualises parental choice not as preference or ideology, but as a relational, risk-laden practice shaped by systemic constraints, institutional responsiveness, and cumulative experiences of inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion emerges as a promise that is pursued, sustained, and sometimes abandoned when it becomes untenable - inclusion, until it isn’t. The study employed semi-structured interviews with parents across primary and secondary schooling, with particular attention to transition points where decisions intensified. Interviews explored placement experiences, sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and parents’ visions for future inclusive schooling. Data were analysed thematically using an iterative approach attentive to both shared patterns and contextual specificity (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Parents were treated as knowledgeable stakeholders, capable of articulating their children’s needs alongside the systemic conditions shaping decision-making (Sharma et al., 2022). Across accounts, choice functioned as an ongoing negotiation between competing risks rather than a simple selection between school types. Parents often remained in mainstream settings despite dissatisfaction to preserve belonging, moving only when academic stagnation, emotional distress, or informal exclusion became unsustainable. Moves to special schools were frequently framed as reluctant, pragmatic responses to unmet needs rather than rejections of inclusion. Satisfaction was shaped less by placement than by relational and institutional responsiveness - being listened to, timely support, curricular flexibility, and environmental adaptation. Parents consistently identified individual educators or advocates as critical relational anchors, highlighting how inclusion is often sustained through personal relationships rather than systemic guarantees. Despite this fragility, parents articulated clear, pragmatic visions for inclusive education grounded in dignity, belonging, and realistic expectations. The Australian case demonstrates that parental choice is not opposition to inclusion, but a critical lens on how inclusion is unevenly enacted and lived.

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