The educational gap between those who experience success at school and those who do not is growing. This is reflected in the current context of schooling in Australia. Australia is experiencing a decline in school attendance, a drop in the number of students completing school (Productivity Commission, 2025), and an increase in disciplinary absences (Down et al., 2024). Unsurprisingly, students from diverse backgrounds, such as First Nation’s students, students with a disability and students living in poverty, are overrepresented in these numbers (Savage, 2023). Alongside this, teachers and school leaders are reporting increased levels of work-related health issues and are leaving the profession in droves (Kidson et al., 2024). Research has identified increased student diversity as one of the factors leading to these concerning trends (Windle et al.,2022).

Decades of rhetoric, policy and reform have failed to deliver an inclusive and sustainable form of schooling that meets the learning needs of all students. In recent years, education systems globally have stagnated in their journeys to become more inclusive, and much of the blame for this is placed at the feet of schools (Boyle et al., 2024). This has led to many families seeking alternatives to regular forms of schooling. In the past decade Australia has seen a significant rise in the number of alternative education settings with an estimated 70,000 plus children and young people now attending these schools. Given the recentness of the phenomenon, there is a dearth of research that has interrogated the impact of this on the educational and post school outcomes of young people. In addition, much of the research globally that has been conducted into alternative education settings has been limited in scope, both in terms of the focus of the studies and the participants involved (for example see Kennedy et al., 2019; Mills et al., 2019).

An opportunity arose to undertake an in-depth study into one alternative educational setting, established to cater for neurodivergent students in one educational jurisdiction, from its inception. The study adopted a qualitative longitudinal case-study design to answer three research questions:

1. How has an alternative educational setting for neurodivergent students developed from its inception?
2. How do students, school staff and families understand and experience its purpose and practices?
3. What are the educational, social and health outcomes for students who attend the school?

The study is framed within an ecological paradigm. To improve practice in education, the contexts in which it occurs must be recognised and appreciated (Muller, 2015). The different systems, individual factors, and their relationships of influence with each other, need to be understood and the study is framed within an ecological paradigm. It is within this paradigm that the process of ‘constructing and strengthening interconnections between ecological systems’ can begin, one which Bronfenbrenner (1976) argues ‘offer[s] promise’ for policy makers; something that is desperately needed. The Ecology of inclusive education reimagined (Anderson, under review) acknowledges that schools ‘embody a complex array of understandings, beliefs, and values encoded in structures, cultures and everyday routines, all of which are usually legitimated and sanctioned by the surrounding social environment’ (Portela, 2013, p. 37). The framework offers a structure for research that eliminates the need to simplify or tidy things up, enabling complex phenomena to be understood in confluence, within the messiness that is the ‘school’, a necessary condition to answer the study’s research questions.

Deep understanding supports meaningful change. This study seeks to interrogate one alternative education settings over a period of four years, to better understand how schools can support the educational, social and health outcomes of students for whom current approaches to schooling are not working.

The study adopted a qualitative longitudinal case-study design on a single school site in one educational jurisdiction in Australia. A longitudinal study allows the researcher to establish “an ongoing relationship with participants, resulting in insightful conclusions” (Derrington, 2019, p. 3), and to conduct research in a way that is done with rather than to the school community; an important facet of researching diverse participant cohorts (Fletcher-Watson et al., 2021). The school is a secondary school that caters for students from years 7 to 10. It has been purposefully designed as a small school, with 16 students admitted into each of the year levels for the start of the 2026 school year. The site was purposefully selected as the researcher was able to engage with the school founders before it opened in 2026, with the aim of following the school through its first four years. This provides the researcher an opportunity to document the experiences of each of the inaugural cohorts across Years 7 to 10, along with the staff and families. The study incorporates the qualitative data collection methods of semi-structured interviews, participant observations, artefacts, documents and descriptive statistics. Participants come from each of the key stakeholder groups – students across all year levels, school staff, and families. All students, staff and families have been invited to participate in the study. Students and their families in each year level will be invited to participate for the entirety of the study, meaning these participants will be followed beyond their involvement with the school. All data will be analysed inductively using thematic analysis. Thematic analysis is ‘a form of pattern recognition’ where assigned codes merge to form themes that ‘become the categories for analysis’ (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006, p. 82). More comprehensively, texts are read and re-read, and meaning is attributed to segments of text. These segments of text, described by Guest et al. (2012), form ‘semantic boundaries’ that are named, described, and examined in terms of their connectedness to other data. Thematic analysis affords the researcher the ability to analysis different data sets across the above-mentioned data types, make connections between them. The focus of this presentation will be on the adoption of this method to better understand the phenomenon under investigation, and present preliminary findings about the inception of the school and the initial experiences of students, staff and families as the school opens in January 2026.

Expected outcomes of this study include: • A detailed, chronological account of how the alternative educational setting was conceptualised, established, and refined over time. • Amplification of student and family voice in discussions of alternative education and neurodiversity-affirming practice. • Identification of key drivers shaping development (e.g. leadership vision, policy constraints, student needs, funding, staffing). • Insight into tensions and adaptations encountered during establishment (e.g. balancing flexibility with system accountability). • An articulated model of practice showing how initial intentions evolved in response to students, families and the constraints of the system. • Rich descriptions of how students, staff, and families conceptualise the purpose of the school and education more broadly. • Evidence of convergences and divergences in stakeholder perspectives (e.g. differing priorities between system-level expectations and family hopes). • Insight into how neurodiversity is understood, affirmed, or contested in everyday educational practice. • Identification of relational and environmental factors that contribute to students’ success (or not) at school. • Descriptions of student and family outcomes beyond schooling. Beyond the individual research questions, the study may provide: • A refined description of the key features underpinning approaches that can support the educational experiences of nuero0divergent students (e.g. pedagogy, relationships, environment, collaboration). • Factors that support successful implementation (e.g. leadership, staff expertise, flexibility). • Systemic, structural, or resource-based barriers limiting scalability or sustainability. • Further evaluation of the usefulness of an ecological framework to deepen our understanding of how systems of schooling can better support the diverse educational, social and health needs of all students.

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