Some children are understood
too late, or not at all.
Bright and capable, yet quietly falling behind. Or misread as lazy, disengaged or disruptive. Years can pass without anyone really understanding why. And over time, a child starts to believe the problem is them.
We build a profile that helps make sense of why. What they are good at. What they find hard. And what actually helps. Then we turn that understanding into practical tools and support, for the child and for the people around them.
For ages 5 to 13. For families and schools.
No diagnosis needed. No waitlist. No child reduced to a label.
In development in Aotearoa New Zealand. Nothing is live yet. We are talking to families, schools and specialists now.
Difference isn't deficit.
Every child deserves to be understood before they are judged, supported before they are struggling, and known for their strengths before they are defined by their challenges.
The children the system was never built to catch.
A child who holds it together at school and unravels at home is not a contradiction in the evidence. It is the finding.
Nobody sees the whole child. Home sees one child, school sees another, and both accounts are true. That gap is not a problem to resolve. It is the most useful thing either of them knows.
One in five children in New Zealand is neurodivergent. Five or six in every classroom. They are not less capable. They learn differently.
Most will never meet the threshold for a formal assessment or funded support, and recognition of a child's needs currently arrives long before any meaningful support does.
Whatever the profile, the experience is often the same. They are working harder than almost any other child in the room. Not because the work is harder, but because everything around the work is harder. The noise. The pace. The transitions. The effort of holding it all together while also trying to learn.
And then the school day ends, and it comes apart at the door. The teacher reports a child who is doing fine. The family is living something else entirely.
The adults are working just as hard. Parents trying everything and running out of things to try. Teachers using the approaches that work for everyone else and watching them not land. Nobody is failing. What works for most children simply does not work for this one, and no one can yet say why.
Somewhere along the way, the child stops believing the problem is with the system. They start believing the problem is with them.
How can you personalise learning for a child you don't yet understand?
That question is the whole argument. Understanding is not a feature alongside the others. It is the thing everything else depends on, so we build it first.
A whole-child profile
The picture above, built from what the child shows us and what the adults around them each see. Their strengths named first, then what they find hard and why. Understanding, never a diagnosis.
In build now.
Strategies that fit this child
The profile turns into specific things to try, at home and in the classroom. Parents and teachers add what they are seeing and what is working, so the picture grows and changes as the child does. Reports and assessments you already hold can live alongside it.
Next.
Learning shaped to the child
Only once the first two are real does personalised learning mean anything. The curriculum reshaped to reach a particular child, at their level and their pace, through what they love. Human led, technology supported. Not more screen time, and only for those who want it.
Later.
Most tools adapt to what a child does. We adapt to who the child is.
Built for every child, and especially the ones who experience the world differently.
With or without a diagnosis, and whether or not one is ever wanted.
Finally, something that helps me understand my child.
You know your child's strengths, and you can see where things are not working. You may not want a clinical label, and you may not be able to get one anyway. What you want is to understand why the mornings are hard, why an ordinary afternoon can undo them, and why the thing that worked last week does not work today.
We help you make sense of what is underneath, then give you practical steps built around your child rather than generic advice. Things to try at home, and clear language to take to their teacher when you need to be understood too.
Support the children who fall through the gaps.
You see children who need support but do not meet the threshold for formal funding or assessment. We give you a shared, whole-child picture, strengths and needs together, that sits alongside your classroom practice without labelling anyone. It turns understanding into the specific things that help: the small adjustments to how you teach, communicate and set up the room so a child can thrive rather than cope.
Clarity now, not when the waitlist ends.
You carry a caseload bigger than the hours in the week and a referral list that takes months to move. We give you a structured, non-diagnostic picture of a child's strengths and needs that you can act on straight away, so meaningful support can start during the wait rather than after it. It works just as well for the children who will never meet the threshold at all.
The context you never get sent.
Five or six children in every New Zealand classroom. Most will never reach your clinic.
You see a child once, on one day, and reconstruct the history from scratch. We are building a consented, longitudinal picture of how a child learns and where the mismatch sits, strengths first and never pathologising, gathered from home and school over time. When a child reaches you, much of the story is already there, so less of your hour goes to assembling context and more to the child in front of you.
Understanding doesn't change a child. It changes the people around them.
From very early in my daughter's life, we noticed how differently she experienced the world. In a way it was hard for her simply to be in the world. She took it in so differently from most people around her, and that was challenging, every day. But she also had this extraordinary spark, and we noticed that too.
What I have learned since is that when the people around a child finally see who that child really is, they can hear what the behaviour has been trying to tell them. Support follows from that. So many children are not one thing. They are ahead in some areas and genuinely finding others hard, all at once, and the strategies usually offered were never built for the way they experience the world.
The earlier a child is understood, the sooner support can come and thriving can begin. That is why this exists.
Kas Craw, Founder
Early, and honest about it.
Nothing here is live yet. This is what has been done, what is being built, and what comes next.
Built with care, on principle.
Non-diagnostic by design
We explain how a child learns and what helps. We do not diagnose, screen for conditions, or apply labels, and the product is not built to.
Your family owns the data
The profile belongs to the child's family. You choose what is shared and with whom, you can withdraw it, and it is never sold to anyone.
Privacy Act 2020
Designed from the start to align with New Zealand privacy law, with consent gathered separately for any research use.
Home counts as evidence
What a family sees in the evenings carries the same weight as what a teacher sees at eleven in the morning. Neither account is the whole child on its own.
Evidence before claims
Where we do not yet know something, the profile says so. Every statement in it can be traced back to what it was based on.
Built in Aotearoa New Zealand
Designed here, with equity at the core rather than added afterwards.
Understanding shouldn't depend on a diagnosis, a waitlist, or what a family can afford.
We are building a school-initiated route so cost is never the reason a child goes unknown, alongside a model where families who can pay help fund free access for those who cannot. Understanding from day one, for every child.
The questions behind why we are building this.
These are not really frequently asked questions. They are the ones we had to answer for ourselves before we started, and the ones we would want answered if this were our child.
Why does Know My Child need to exist?
We collect a lot of information about what children can do academically. We collect much less about how an individual child learns, what gets in their way, what their strengths are, and what helps them thrive.
Parents hold years of knowledge about their child. Teachers see things families never see. Children know things about their own experience that neither adult can see. Those pieces usually stay separate.
And usually the home sees it first. The meltdown after school, the homework that takes three hours, the child who holds everything together until the front door closes behind them. Families can carry that for years before anyone at school raises a concern, and carry it largely on their own.
Meanwhile the consequences go well beyond achievement. When a child struggles year after year and does not understand why, they can start to believe they are the problem. Confidence drops. Anxiety rises. They pull away from learning. And the strengths they do have go unnamed.
We want a child understood early enough that the adults around them can say: this is what you are really good at, this is what is harder for you, this is why some things feel more difficult, and these are the things that help you do your best.
It is not ultimately about producing a profile. It is about helping a child be understood early enough that we can change their experience, rather than waiting until years of struggle have changed how they see themselves.
Why should support have to wait for a diagnosis?
It should not, and for a lot of children it does.
Diagnosis matters. For some children it is exactly the right pathway, and we are not trying to replace it.
But if we already know that a child cannot hold a three-part instruction in their head, or becomes overwhelmed in a noisy room, or works far better with something visual in front of them, we can respond to that now. Nobody needs to know whether that eventually sits inside ADHD, autism, dyslexia or nothing at all before a parent or a teacher can make a useful adjustment.
And those adjustments are not only about learning. The same understanding changes the morning routine, the supermarket, the birthday party, and the hour after school when everything falls apart. Being understood matters everywhere a child has to live, not only where they are taught.
We work in that earlier space.
What if a child is completely different at home and at school?
Then that is information, not a contradiction.
Children genuinely do function differently across environments. Different structure, different noise, different demands, different relationships, different levels of support. Some children hold it together all day at school and come apart at home. Some are settled at home and lost in a classroom.
So when the accounts differ, we do not ask which adult is right. We ask what is different about those two environments.
Sometimes that difference is the most useful thing we learn about the child.
Who gets to decide what is true about a child?
Nobody automatically.
A parent is not automatically right because they have known the child longest. A teacher is not automatically right because they are the education professional. And a child cannot always explain what they are experiencing.
They are different sources, seeing different things, under different conditions. So we keep track of who saw what, where, and in what circumstances, and then look at the evidence together.
That is very different from collecting three questionnaires, averaging them, and calling the average the child.
Why should understanding a child start again every year?
It should not, but it usually does.
Most of what a good teacher learns about a child over a year leaves with that teacher in December. The next one starts close to zero. So does the next school.
We want the understanding to belong to the child. A current picture, and the history alongside it: what has changed, what support has worked, and the conditions under which this child has done well.
The family is the one thread running through all of it. They were there for the year before, and they will be there for the year after. That is part of why the record belongs to them.
No child should have to start from nothing every January.
Can you personalise learning without first understanding the learner?
We do not think you can.
Plenty of technology adapts to what a child does. Get an answer wrong, get an easier question. That is useful, but it is not the same as understanding the child.
So the order is deliberate. Understand first. Then support. Then personalise.
Doing it the other way round means personalising for a learner nobody has actually understood.
How it actually works.
The practical things families and schools ask us before they take part.
Is this an assessment, or a diagnosis?
Neither, in the way those words are usually meant. Parts of it use assessment methods, but Know My Child is a non-diagnostic understanding platform.
We are not asking whether a child has ADHD, autism or dyslexia. We are asking what can be understood reliably about how this child is functioning now, so the adults around them can support them better.
Sometimes what we see may be a reason for a family to seek a professional assessment, and we take that pathway seriously.
Is it only for neurodivergent children?
No. Neurodivergent children are an obvious group who may benefit, because differences in processing, attention, regulation or learning can make a standard environment harder to access.
But the question underneath applies to every child: how does this particular child learn best? No child should have to be identified as different before they are allowed to be understood as an individual.
What does taking part involve?
Three contributions, and none of them are long.
The child explores a game-based world across three short sessions, spread over about a month. Listening, memory, pattern and rule activities that feel like play rather than testing. To the child it is a game, not an assessment, and nothing about it is presented to them as something they can fail.
A parent completes one structured questionnaire about what you already know: how your child learns, what they find hard, what they are drawn to, what helps, and what they are like at home.
Their teacher completes one too, currently around 25 to 30 minutes, based on what they have already observed in the classroom. There is no ongoing admin and no second system to keep up to date.
What do families and teachers get back?
Different things, and neither of you has to interpret raw data to use them.
The family receives the profile itself. A plain-language picture of how your child thinks, learns and experiences the world, strengths first, with practical strategies for home: the end of a long day, transitions, homework, noise, sleep, and the moments that reliably go wrong.
The teacher receives classroom strategies for that child. Not twenty pages to interpret. Something usable: this is who I am, these are my strengths, this is what is hard for me, and this is what helps me.
Who sees and owns the profile?
The family owns it.
A school may start the process and a teacher contributes to it, but taking part does not make a child's profile school property.
The teacher receives classroom strategies for that child, so there is value in it for them either way. The family decides whether to share the full profile, a one-page version, the strategies, or nothing further.
How do you know the information can be trusted?
We do not rely on one questionnaire, one activity or one person's view of a child. We bring together different types of evidence from the child, their family and their teacher, and we keep track of where each piece came from and the context it was seen in.
Findings have to meet an evidence threshold before we will report them. When they do not, we say so. A commercially convenient system would produce a beautiful, complete profile for every child. A trustworthy one sometimes has to say that we do not know yet.
We would rather leave a gap than fill it with false certainty.
What role does AI play?
AI does not decide what is true about a child.
Underneath every profile is an evidence engine: a defined set of rules about what each piece of evidence can and cannot support. Which findings hold, which need backing up from more than one source, and which simply do not have enough behind them yet.
Those rules were written deliberately, with input from clinical and educational psychology and an independent psychometrician, and they are being tested rather than assumed. The engine is what determines the content of a profile.
AI comes in after that point, and only to turn established findings into clear language. Explaining them plainly to a family, phrasing them usefully for a teacher. It is not free to look at a pile of information and decide that a child has an attention problem.
Human led, AI supported.
Interested in
what we are building?
Whether you are a parent, an educator, a specialist, a researcher, or simply interested in the work, we would like to hear from you. Tell us who you are and we will keep you posted as this progresses.
Prefer email? kas@knowmychild.org
Thank you, we have your details.
We will keep you posted as this progresses. If you asked a question in your message, you will hear from Kas directly.