Healthy Trajectories was delighted to take part in the ABP Symposium 2025, “Designing Learning Spaces for Neurodiversity and Disability”, which took place on the 11th and 12th of November, 2025.

The symposium brought together designers, educators, researchers, and people with lived experience to ask: how can learning spaces and campuses truly include everyone?

Through the two days, presenters bringing diverse perspectives, described how their projects and experience-driven innovations could help close the gap to reach our ambitions of authentic inclusion and participation. Keynote speakers included Dr Beth McInally, Queensland Department of Education’s Executive Director of Disability, Dr Jodie Wilson, a Graduate Researcher at Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre, La Trobe University, and Professor Magda Mostafa, the Principal and Co-Founding Partner of StudioTM . Hearing from panels including designers, educators, researchers, and people with lived experience was a highlight.

At the event, our team member Dr Nicole Merrick presented on one of the studies within the ARC Linkage project, “Designing Learning Spaces for Diversity, Inclusion and Participation” which aims to identify how the design of schools influences the full participation of students with disability. Healthy Trajectories is a partner in the ARC project. By learning what helps and hinders the participation for students with disability in school, architects, designers, educators, students and their families can be informed around how to create more inclusive school spaces. In her presentation, Nicole discussed the ARC project team’s preliminary findings from an explorative qualitative study which utilised the use of photo voice method to investigate the day-to-day campus experiences of students with disability in Australian schools.
These preliminary findings from this study pointed to several challenges, such as the need for active breaks for students during the day and transition spaces being busy and challenging for students with mobility challenges. They also discovered that students value calm and quiet spaces (both indoors and outdoors) and that having engaging and enjoyable activities in school can help students better manage less than ideal spaces. The outcomes from this study contributes to the evidence base around our understanding of what helps and hinders participation for all students and how to design more inclusive learning spaces.

Nicole also co-facilitated a workshop with Kelly Day on “Children’s insights into how the built environment can help or hinder their participation in schools.” This workshop centred around the guidance and commentary on learning spaces that came out of a series of interviews with school children with disability.

Healthy Trajectories Director Professor Christine Imms chaired a stream session and participated as a panel member for two other sessions. The stream session covered designing for inclusion in schools and other settings and understanding learning environments for inclusion. The panel sessions were titled “Physical environment design has never been the focus of inclusive education. Why not?” and “Designing learning spaces for diversity, inclusion and participation: Insights from a 3-year research project.”

The Designing learning spaces for neurodiversity and disability: Proceedings of the 2025 Symposium is now live and can be found here: https://doi.org/10.26188/30153229