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New teacher, new school, new therapist: how to protect your child’s progress into the new school year

TheDalzaTeam — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 10:40:28 +0000

By Robby Coelho, founder of Dalza and parent of a child with additional needs

Every year around this time, parents start wondering about next year. Who will the new teacher be? Will the new school read the reports? Will the new therapist know what's already been tried? Underneath it all sits a quieter worry, that the progress made this year might not make it into the next one.

If your child has additional needs, you'll know how much work went into this year. There were the meetings, the adjustments, and the trial and error until something finally clicked, along with the slow building of trust between your child and the people around them. It makes sense to feel protective of all of that as the year draws to a close. I've felt it myself every December, and I've learned that the end of the year is the riskiest time of all for children like ours. That's exactly why I built a solution for it, which I'll share with you at the end of this article.

What a transition looks like

The end of the year can bring a lot of change at once. For some children it's a move into a new grade with a new teacher. For others it's a bigger step, like Grade R into Grade 1 or primary into high school, or a move to a new school, sometimes in a new city. Some will start the year with a new support team, a different therapist or a different programme altogether. Often it's more than one of these at the same time.

Each of these changes means the people who know your child well are handing over to people who are meeting them for the first time. Some of what this year's team knows sits in reports and assessments that anyone can read. Much more of it lives in their heads. Over a year, a teacher picks up so many pieces of understanding: that your child settles better if they can arrive a few minutes early, that instructions land when they're given one step at a time, that going quiet usually means they're overwhelmed, that a particular friend helps at break time. A therapist learns which approaches worked, which didn't, and why. Very little of this is written down anywhere, and it's exactly what a new person needs most.

When a transition happens without that understanding, the new teacher or therapist has to learn it all again from scratch, usually through trial and error, and your child is the one who lives through the errors.

What the research says about school transitions and additional needs

The research on school transitions for children with additional needs is consistent. Moves between schools and phases are a particularly vulnerable time, and children with additional needs often need a more personalised approach than the general transition support schools offer everyone. A 2026 study of the move from primary to high school found that parents link good transitions to strong communication between home and school, and to information being shared between the old school and the new one. When that sharing doesn't happen, things that worked are dropped while the new team waits to see how things go, and problems can escalate quickly.

Many children also seem to cope at first and only start to struggle months later, once the novelty wears off and the extra support around the move is withdrawn. A smooth first week is no guarantee that a transition has gone well.

The load families carry

Research consistently shows that parents of children with additional needs experience higher parenting stress than other parents. A large part of that stress is coordination: keeping the teacher, the therapists, the doctor and the family on the same page, remembering who said what, and making sure everyone is working towards the same goals.

Transitions add to that load. Every new teacher, school or therapist usually means another meeting where you start at the beginning, explaining the diagnosis, the history, what's been tried and what works. You dig out old reports, forward emails and try to remember the details that made the difference. Many parents have told their child's story so many times they could recite it in their sleep, and each time there's a worry that something important was left out, or that it won't be read at all. It's emotionally, mentally and administratively draining, and it lands at the busiest time of year, when everyone is already stretched.

Then there's the uncertainty. Until the new year starts, you don't know whether the new teacher will understand your child, whether the agreed support will be in place, or whether you'll be back at square one by February. For many parents, that waiting is one of the hardest parts.

How a poor transition affects your child

Children feel it too. While the new team catches up, your child is the one living with the gap. Strategies that worked go missing. Adults misread what your child is trying to communicate, and behaviour that comes from anxiety or overwhelm can be mistaken for something else. Your child has to show all over again what they need, often at the moment they feel least settled. For a child who already finds change hard, those first weeks can set back a lot of progress, and it can take a long time to rebuild their confidence and trust.

None of this is anyone's fault. Teachers and therapists want to do right by your child, and they can only work with what they've been told.

What a good handover looks like

A good handover is the best protection against all of this. It makes the move smoother for your child, for you, and for the new teacher, school or therapist, who gets to start the year already understanding your child. A good handover captures:

Your child's current goals and how close they are to reaching them, so nobody starts over on work that's half done.
The strategies that work, as specifically as possible, along with the ones that have been tried and didn't, so time isn't lost repeating them.
What helps and what overwhelms: triggers, early warning signs, and what helps your child calm down.
Anything that has changed this year, such as a new diagnosis, a change in medication or a change at home.
The most recent reports and assessments, from school and from any therapists.
Who is involved in your child's support and how to reach them, so the new team knows who to ask.
Observations from this year's teacher and therapist in their own words. A short note on what they've learned about your child is often worth more than a formal report.

Timing matters as much as content. The best time to start is now, while this year's team still remembers the detail and before schools close for the holidays. Once this year's teacher has moved on to a new class, most of what they know goes with them. The new team needs this information before the first day of school or therapy, so support carries on from day one instead of being rebuilt after something goes wrong. Keep a full copy that belongs to you, too. Schools and practices keep their own files, but you're the one who goes with your child from year to year.

Where Dalza fits

This is what we built Dalza for, because we understand how pivotal transitions are. My own family has been through many of them: from one school year to the next, between schools, teachers and therapists, and even a move across continents. I know what it's like to sit across from someone new and start the story again from the beginning.

Dalza gives your child a shared profile that you, as the parent, control. Throughout the year, everyone on your child's team adds to it, including teachers, therapists and family members. Goals, strategies, observations, reports and progress build up in one place as they happen, so the handover is ready long before the year ends and nobody has to remember to write it all up in December.

When someone new joins your child's team, you invite them in and they're onboarded straight away with the full picture. They can see what the team learned, what works and what to watch for, before they've even met your child. You don't have to re-explain and retell the whole story again and again, and your child doesn't have to wait for the adults to catch up.

You decide who joins your child's team, and the record stays with your child wherever they go next.

What you can do before the year ends

There are still a few weeks of term left, and that's enough time to make a real difference.

Create your child's Dalza profile and add the reports and goals you already have.
Invite this year's teacher and therapist to the profile, and ask them to add a short note on what they've learned about your child while it's still fresh.
When you know who next year's teacher or therapist will be, invite them in so they know who your child is before they even meet in person.

Your first month on Dalza is free, and after that it's R95 a month.

Start your child's profile here.

The end of the year will always bring change. With the right handover, the work your child, their team and you have put in this year can come with them into the next one, and the new year can start right where this one left off.

By Robby Coelho and the Dalza team

For more, follow our Instagram or Facebook.

Frequently asked questions

When should I start preparing for my child's school transition?

As early as possible, and ideally before the current school year ends. This year's teacher and therapist know your child best right now, and once they move on to new children that detail fades quickly. Ask them for their observations while they still remember them.

What information should I give my child's new teacher?

Your child's current goals and progress, the strategies that work and those that didn't, triggers and calming strategies, any changes this year, recent reports and assessments, contact details for the support team, and short notes from this year's teacher and therapist in their own words.

What if my child seems fine in the first week of the new school year?

A good first week is encouraging, but research shows many children with additional needs only start to struggle weeks or months later, once the novelty wears off and extra support is withdrawn. Keep checking in with the new teacher through the first term.

How do I stop having to repeat my child's story to every new teacher or therapist?

Keep one shared record of your child's goals, strategies, reports and observations that you control and can share with each new person who joins your child's team. Dalza was built for exactly this.

References

Hamilton, L.G., Lewis, K. & Vincent, J. (2026). Improving school transitions for children with special educational needs and disabilities (STEPS final project report). York St John University. https://doi.org/10.25421/yorksj.32316672

Neal, S., Rice, F., Ng-Knight, T., Riglin, L. & Frederickson, N. (2016). Exploring the longitudinal association between interventions to support the transition to secondary school and child anxiety. Journal of Adolescence, 50. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1493677/

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The Things You Don’t Know Yet

TheDalzaTeam — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:53:43 +0000

The things you don’t know yet

A note to parents near the start, from someone a little further along.

There is a moment that arrives for many South African families, and almost nobody sees it coming.

Your child is eighteen. They have been accepted to university. They will need some accommodation to write their exams fairly, whether that is extra time, a scribe, a separate venue, or permission to type. So you approach the university’s disability unit, and they ask you for documentation.

Not a diagnosis. Documentation. The educational psychologist’s report, and the one before that. The record of what the school actually put in place, and when. Evidence that this has been true for years rather than something that appeared at the end of Grade 12. Universities will ask a student to bring across whatever they were granted at school, which means someone must be able to produce it.

And here is the second part, which lands harder than the first: your child is now an adult. The unit registers them, not you. They sign the forms. They disclose or choose not to. You can sit beside them, but the responsibility has moved across the table.

I am a parent of a child with additional needs, and I did not think about any of this when my child was small. At eight, you are not planning for eighteen. You are getting through the week.

What nobody tells you at eight

What makes this journey difficult is not a single obstacle. It is that you cannot see the obstacles from where you are standing. You solve the problem in front of you, your child grows, the ground shifts, and a new problem appears that you had no way of anticipating.

Here are a few of the things I have learned:

A diagnosis on its own often isn’t enough. Many parents assume that a formal diagnosis is the key that unlocks support, and that once you have it, the hard part is behind you. When it comes to formal concessions, whether at the end of school or beyond it, the diagnosis is only the beginning of the application. Assessment bodies in South Africa generally want to see a picture built up over time: a psycho-educational report, yes, but also school reports going back, samples of your child’s work, comments from several subject teachers written independently, and reports from the therapists who have been involved. Provincial education departments will also ask for proof that the school itself intervened, through the support processes it is required to follow. A diagnosis tells them what your child has. The rest tells them how it has affected your child in the classroom, year after year, which is what they are actually assessing.

Reports have a shelf life, and the old ones still matter. The psycho-educational report you paid a great deal for when your child was nine will not be accepted as current evidence when they are sixteen. Most applications require a report that is no more than two years old, so you will be paying for an assessment again at exactly the moment when school fees and university applications are at their heaviest. That does not make the earlier report worthless. It becomes something else entirely: proof that this is long-standing rather than convenient. Its value is the date on it, which is unfortunate, because that is usually the report that has gone missing.

The evidence is made of ordinary, forgettable things. When you read what assessors are looking for, it is oddly domestic. Handwriting that falls apart as a test goes on. Work that is never finished in the time given. Reading that is accurate but slow. Homework that takes three hours when it should take one. These are the details that teachers describe in their comments, and those comments carry real weight. At the time, they arrive as a passing remark at a parents’ evening, a message on WhatsApp, a note at the bottom of a term report. Ten years later, they are exactly the evidence you need, and you will have no memory of who said what, or when.

At some point the file stops being yours. We tend to imagine this happening at eighteen, but in South African law the shift begins earlier. A child of twelve who has the maturity to understand what is involved can consent to their own therapy and medical treatment. From that point on, you are increasingly in the position of supporting a young person’s decisions rather than making them. By the time they are applying for university accommodations, support at work, or anything else that requires them to explain their own history, they need to be able to hold that history themselves. Handing over a box of loose paperwork and a decade of things you happen to remember is not much of a handover.

Support and money are attached to paperwork too. If you claim disability-related medical expenses from SARS, that rests on a form completed by a practitioner, which must be renewed on a schedule. If your family receives the Care Dependency Grant, it ends on your child’s eighteenth birthday, and the adult grant is a fresh application in your child’s name with a fresh state medical assessment, so you need to start it months in advance. None of these systems talks to each other, and none of them will remind you.

And every new person starts from zero. This is the one that parents raise most often, and it is not about paperwork at all. A new teacher each January. A therapist who leaves the practice. A school that keeps its records in three different places and then cannot find the one you need. Each time, you sit down and tell the whole story again from the beginning, and each time a little of it is lost, because you are summarising eleven years into twenty minutes with someone who has thirty other children to think about. You become the only complete record your child has, held mostly in your head, at the exact stage of life when you are the most tired you have ever been.

There is a version of this that works.

This can all sound like an argument for treating your child as an administrative project, and that is not what I am describing.

The reason to keep a real record is that it is the only way your child’s story stays theirs. Everything else that holds information about them holds a fragment: the school has its version, the OT has hers, the paediatrician has his, and each one is partial and eventually gets archived, lost, or handed to someone new. The complete picture only exists if somebody keeps it, and the only person with both the standing and the motivation to do that is you.

That is why we built Dalza the way we did. It is one place where your child’s complete profile lives, owned and controlled by you as the parent, holding the reports and the assessments alongside the ordinary observations that turn out to matter down the line: what a teacher noticed in Grade 3, what worked in therapy and what did not, how long homework actually takes. Everyone who works with your child can see the same picture instead of the fragment they happen to hold, which means you stop repeating yourself. And when your child is old enough to carry it, it goes with them.

We hear one thing from parents more than anything else, and it is almost always some version of the same sentence: “I wish I had this years ago.” You can absolutely start when your child is fourteen, and it will still be worth doing. It is simply worth more when you start at six, because the record you are building is made of the years you have not lived yet.

You cannot know what is coming. You can make sure that when it arrives, you are not trying to reconstruct a decade from memory.

By Robby Coelho and the Dalza team

For more, follow our Instagram or Facebook.

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Why Can’t my Child Cope with New-Term Change?

TheDalzaTeam — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:18:48 +0000

Why Can’t my Child Cope with New-Term Change?

Beneath the calendar reminders and stationery lists that accompany a new school year is the real worry: How will all this change affect my child’s body and brain?

For many families of neurodivergent children, the weight of that question becomes heavier through the first few weeks of the new school year.

Many autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, and sensory-sensitive learners rely on predictability to stay regulated.

When people, places, and pace all shift at once, their cognitive load and anxiety can climb, which makes it tougher to focus, follow instructions, or find their footing socially.

Practical routines matter: for example, clear, predictable structures and consistent cues reduce uncertainty and support attention.

You might also want to consider what experts call “acute monitoring.” In plain language, that means capturing quick notes, often daily or weekly for two to four weeks, to track how the recent changes are affecting your child and to adjust support quickly.

What should you track when everything shifts?

Keep it light but useful, just the breadcrumbs adults can act on:

Sleep & morning start: tiredness amplifies anxiety and inattention.
Mood & stress signals: clinginess, shutdowns, pacing, nail-picking.
Triggers & tolerances: noise, crowded corridors, moving between spaces.
Appetite & energy: dips and spikes often mirror stress.
Social notes: who they sit or play with; who helps them feel safe.

Equally important is where those breadcrumbs live. School is only a slice of your child’s year (a child spends on average 14% of the year in school). What happens at home, aftercare, and therapy shows up in class, and the other way round.

When notes sit in scattered emails and WhatsApp threads, the teachers miss patterns and parents end up re-explaining. Strong parent–teacher partnerships are consistently linked to better academic, social, and emotional outcomes; sharing a clear, current picture is what makes that partnership work.

That’s where Dalza helps. It’s an award-winning, secure app that holds a living record of your child. One hub you control, where school, home, and therapy can see the same up-to-date essentials.

Tracking Patterns • Feedback • Action Plans (made simple):

Patterns: Log short notes on sleep, mood, behaviour, appetite, and those tricky moments. Over a couple of weeks, the trends pop.
Feedback: Capture input from teachers, therapists, and even from your child, how does this change feel, and does that shift week to week?
Action Plans: When a pattern appears (e.g., loud assembly → overwhelm), agree one small tweak (headphones + movement break), record it, and see what changes.

It only takes a quick note each evening to start spotting patterns and feel the stress of trying to remember it all lifting.

You decide who sees what, when (POPIA/GDPR-aware by design). If school staff or therapists change, all the necessary information is immediately available, so your child’s support doesn’t skip a beat.

Change is inevitable; disruption isn’t. With a short burst of acute monitoring and one calm place for Patterns • Feedback • Action Plans, your child’s support stays responsive, and you don’t have to hold it all in your head.

Try Dalza free at dalza.com.

By the Dalza team

For more, follow our Instagram or Facebook.

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Starting The School Year Without Starting From Scratch

TheDalzaTeam — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:10:50 +0000

Starting The School Year Without Starting From Scratch.

Smoother Transitions for Kids with additional needs (and their parents).

The new school year can dial up parent anxiety, especially if your child has additional learning needs.

New class, new teacher, new routines (maybe a whole new school) can all come with an uneasy feeling: will the teacher know what my child needs to settle?

The night before day one, you find yourself scrolling through emails and WhatsApp threads at 11 p.m., piecing together a “what works” list and wondering when you’ll find time with the teacher to explain your child, without reducing them to a list of challenges.

Meanwhile, your child is facing new rooms, new rules, and often making new friends. It’s a lot - for both of you.

Transitions are a high-risk zone. For many neurodivergent children, predictability is essential for regulation. Parents feel the strain of advocacy fatigue; retelling the same story, hoping the crucial parts aren’t lost in translation, and worrying about how much to share with each new adult.

Schools work hard to bridge these gaps, and a beginning-of-term transition plan is a helpful start. Here’s what you might let the teacher know about your child:

What they might notice in class: 3–5 specific, observable behaviours.
What helps: 3–6 concrete supports, with simple if–then examples.
How to handle challenging moments: the response that works if things escalate.

If your child is finding the transition particularly tough, some parents recommend:

Sending a favourite book or small item from home for the teacher to share with the class.
Visiting a quiet, familiar space at school before heading into the classroom.
Arriving a few minutes early and asking the teacher to give your child a purposeful job as classmates arrive.

Still, even the best handover is just a snapshot in time. Children grow; strategies evolve week by week.

Without a record that lives and breathes with your child, continuity cracks appear. Teachers may miss last term’s wins, therapists may lack context, and you’re back to starting from scratch.

That “remember everything” pressure is real. Reports here, notes there, a dozen threads everywhere. Holding it all in your head makes it harder to think clearly and to show up calm.

Research shows that when parents and teachers are well-connected partners, children do better academically, socially, and emotionally, another reason to make sharing easier and more consistent.

That’s where Dalza comes in. Dalza is an award-winning, secure app where your child’s story lives and evolves across home, school, and therapy. Dalza gives you one organised place for strengths, supports, reports, and real-life notes, so this term’s teacher and next term’s therapist don’t start from zero.

You decide who sees what, when (POPIA/GDPR-compliant by design). And when staff or schools change, the record goes with your child. No more re-explaining the same history.

Transitions will never be completely friction-free. New terms bring new faces, timetables, and friendships. But you don’t have to hold every detail.

Keeping a living record in Dalza protects what you’ve already built, honours your child beyond a checklist of challenges, and makes collaboration simpler for everyone who supports them.

Start your secure, living record today at https://app.dalza.com/welcome.

By the Dalza team

For more, follow our Instagram or Facebook.

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