“But you’ll fix it, right?”: A small problem with making promises we can’t keep in Behaviour Support

But you’ll fix it all, right?” says a mother looking at me, exhausted.

Oh no. It’s those words again. The ones I dread a little, because I know what she is really asking me. She isn’t asking whether I can write a Behaviour Support Plan, complete an assessment, analyse data or suggest a few strategies. She is asking whether somebody has finally arrived who can make everything easier. Whether I can stop the behaviours that have frightened, exhausted or confused everyone. Whether I can make her child happier, safer and more able to participate in the world. And because she is tired, and because she loves them, and because perhaps she has already spent years navigating systems, appointments, providers and various acronyms that sound suspiciously like government departments invented them during a fever dream, I completely understand why she wants me to say yes.

But I can’t. Or, more accurately, I shouldn’t.

Behaviour Support Practitioners can play an incredibly important role in helping people understand behaviour, reduce barriers, build skills, improve environments and ultimately improve quality of life. I absolutely believe in the work or I would have chosen a profession involving considerably fewer reports. But I think we need to become much more comfortable explaining what our role can realistically achieve. We do not “fix” people. We cannot guarantee that a behaviour will disappear, that somebody will meet a particular goal within a particular timeframe, or that a particular strategy will work simply because it has been written by someone with a practitioner number and a suspicious number of postgraduate qualifications.

That distinction has been bothering me more lately because I am increasingly seeing disability services marketed with claims about how quickly people can achieve their NDIS goals, build relationships, develop skills or transform their lives. I understand why businesses want to communicate optimism. Hope matters. Participants should absolutely expect providers to be purposeful, competent and accountable. But there is a point where optimism quietly changes clothes and becomes a promise, and I think we should be very careful about crossing it.

Never as a counsellor would I advertise, “Cure your anxiety about seeing your mother-in-law at Christmas: FAST!” Apart from being professionally questionable, there are simply too many variables involved. I have not met your mother-in-law. She may be delightful. She may be the entire functional assessment.

The same basic ethical principle applies here. The NDIS Code of Conduct requires providers and workers to act with integrity, honesty and transparency, and the Commission specifically connects that principle with participants being able to make informed decisions about their supports. That does not mean the Code contains a special subsection entitled “Please Stop Writing Dubious Marketing Copy About Rapid Behaviour Change.” Sadly, my lobbying efforts have not yet reached that level. But it does mean that how we describe what our services can realistically achieve matters. If there is genuine uncertainty about an outcome (and human behaviour contains quite a lot of genuine uncertainty) we should be honest about it.

This is particularly important in Positive Behaviour Support because contemporary PBS is not built around the premise that there is a defective behaviour sitting inside a person waiting for an expert to remove it. The NDIS Commission’s current Positive Behaviour Support Capability Framework describes PBS as person-centred, rights-based and evidence-based practice, with a focus on proactive support, safeguarding, quality of life and the reduction and elimination of restrictive practices. Behaviour is something we seek to understand in context: what might be contributing to it, what the person may be communicating, what needs are not being met, what skills or supports might help, and what may need to change around the person as well as within their own repertoire of skills.

And unfortunately for anybody hoping for a neat clinical equation, human behaviour is gloriously inconvenient.

Every person arrives with their own combination of biology, disability, learning history, communication, relationships, culture, sensory experiences, physical health, mental health, trauma, preferences, skills, environment and past experiences. Add sleep, pain, housing, family stress, staffing, access to meaningful activities, finances, medication, communication barriers and whatever happened at 7:42 that morning when somebody moved the blue cup, and suddenly the idea that one practitioner can simply “fix the behaviour” starts looking a little ambitious.

Sometimes behaviour changes enormously. Sometimes an intervention works beautifully. Sometimes we make one surprisingly small environmental change and everybody stares at each other wondering why nobody thought of it six months ago. Sometimes progress is painstakingly slow. Sometimes we discover that the behaviour everyone wanted gone was serving an extremely important function for the person and our actual work is helping them meet that need in a safer or more effective way. Sometimes the individual needs support to develop new skills. Sometimes the people around them need new skills. Sometimes the environment itself is the thing behaving badly.

That is why good Behaviour Support should involve assessment, formulation, observation, collaboration, implementation, monitoring and review rather than a single clever strategy handed down from the Behavioural Mountain. The Commission describes specialist behaviour support as involving understanding the reasons for behaviour, developing strategies intended to improve quality of life, putting plans into action and checking over time whether things are improving. That last part is important. We assess. We try. We monitor. We learn. We adapt. Evidence-informed practice does not mean knowing in advance exactly what will happen; it means having a defensible reason for what we are trying and being willing to change course when the evidence tells us to.

There is also another inconvenient character in this story: the system around the person.

A Behaviour Support Practitioner might develop an excellent recommendation, but we cannot personally manufacture stable housing, adequate funding, consistent staffing, strong family capacity, good communication between providers, appropriate healthcare, reliable implementation and a workforce that has all read the plan. If somebody’s environment remains chaotic, their pain remains untreated, staff change every three weeks, their communication system is not available when they need it, or the strategy requires resources that simply do not exist, those things will affect outcomes. That does not absolve practitioners of responsibility; it means competent practice includes recognising barriers, documenting them, advocating around them and adapting support wherever we reasonably can. It also means we should be cautious about taking sole credit when things improve and sole blame when complex systems do not.

This becomes particularly important in the current NDIS environment because participants, families and support networks are quite reasonably asking harder questions about value for money. They should. If someone is spending funding on Behaviour Support, they deserve to know what the practitioner is doing, why they are doing it, what the work is intended to achieve and how anybody will know whether it is helping. Billable hours should not disappear mysteriously into the clinical wilderness while everybody politely waits for a PDF to emerge.

But value for money and guaranteed outcome are not the same thing. In fact, the NDIA’s own current description of reasonable and necessary supports says supports need to be likely to be effective and beneficial, alongside representing value for money and helping a participant work towards their goals. The language matters: likely. Not guaranteed. Not “your goals achieved in twelve easy sessions or your money back.” The NDIS itself operates within the reality that supports are selected because there is good reason to believe they will help. Human outcomes remain outcomes, not contractual certainties.

Accountability should therefore make Behaviour Support better, not more performative. It should push practitioners towards clear goals, appropriate assessment, thoughtful use of evidence, good data, meaningful collaboration and the courage to say when something is not working. It should also make us better at explaining progress honestly. Sometimes progress is fewer incidents. Sometimes it is less severe distress. Sometimes it is somebody communicating “no” before reaching crisis. Sometimes it is a family understanding something they previously interpreted as deliberate defiance. Sometimes it is a person having greater choice, predictability or control even though the behaviour everybody originally wanted eliminated still occasionally occurs.

And this is where I must reluctantly disclose the disappointing truth about my own professional powers.

I don’t have the answers simply because I am a Behaviour Support Practitioner. I am not special because I work with NDIS participants. I have studied psychology, completed postgraduate qualifications, undertaken a ridiculous amount of additional training and spent more evenings than I care to admit reading research about extremely specific things that I had no intention of knowing quite so much about when I woke up that morning. I assess. I consult. I supervise. I problem-solve. I read my little ass off about strategies and evidence-based practice because I take the responsibility seriously.

But that is the extent of my non-existent magic powers.

What I can offer is professional knowledge, curiosity, clinical reasoning, persistence, collaboration and a willingness to keep asking why. I can promise to listen carefully. I can promise to look beyond the obvious explanation. I can promise to involve the person as meaningfully as possible, examine the environment around them, work with the people who support them and change my thinking when the evidence says my original hypothesis was wrong. I can advocate when systems are getting in the way. I can tell somebody when I genuinely do not know something and then go and find someone who does.

What I cannot ethically promise is that another human being will behave differently because I arrived.

Perhaps, then, we need to become more careful about the promise we make when people begin Behaviour Support. Instead of “we will fix this,” perhaps it should be: we will work very hard to understand this. We will identify what can reasonably change. We will build on the person’s strengths. We will support the people around them. We will use evidence thoughtfully rather than ceremonially. We will monitor whether our work is actually making life better and, where it is not, we will not spend six months defending the strategy simply because we wrote it.

And we will be honest about the fact that meaningful change can take time.

I know that is less marketable than “achieve your goals fast.” It does not fit quite as neatly onto an Instagram tile. There is probably no Canva template called “Complex Human Behaviour Influenced by Multiple Interacting Variables — Results May Vary.”

But I think participants and their families deserve that honesty.

They deserve practitioners who are hopeful without selling certainty, confident without pretending omniscience, and accountable without confusing accountability with guarantees. They deserve to understand both what our expertise can offer and where the limits of that expertise sit.

So, “But you’ll fix it all, right?”

No. I cannot promise that.

But I can promise that I will bring everything I reasonably can to helping us understand what is happening, identify what might make things better, support the people involved to make those changes possible and keep checking whether what we are doing is actually helping.

There are no guarantees with human behaviour.

But there absolutely can be a guarantee about the integrity, effort and quality of the support we provide along the way.