The NEST program, which stands for Nurturing Education and Support Together, centres care, predictability, and interdependence as foundational values in educational design. Rooted in a disability justice-informed model, NEST recognises that students do best when they feel safe in both body and identity, when their environments honour relational continuity, and when school structures reduce rather than amplify stress. NEST privileges community building over correction, and adapts the environment before pathologising the child. It offers a blueprint for education grounded in the belief that human variation is expected, welcome, and accommodated through thoughtful, sustainable design.
Benefits
NEST classrooms feature smaller class sizes, embedded access supports, and predictable routines that lower cognitive and sensory load. Each class is co-taught by a team that typically includes a general educator, special educator, and support staff, offering more consistent adult presence and stronger relationship scaffolding. Rather than pulling students out for services, NEST integrates support into the daily rhythm of the classroom, preserving dignity and reducing transitions. The model encourages multi-year relationships and trauma-informed teaching practices, which build trust over time and make emotional regulation and executive function supports part of the everyday environment, not isolated interventions.
Limitations
The most significant limitation is scalability: NEST classrooms require sustained investment, higher staffing levels, and a philosophical shift away from standardisation. Without deep district-wide alignment, NEST can become a siloed program that benefits a few while leaving the broader system unchanged. Additionally, if staffing ratios are reduced or specialist roles are absorbed into generalist duties, the model can erode from the inside. There is also the risk of misapplication—where schools adopt the language of NEST but fail to embody its values in everyday practice, thereby recreating exclusion within an inclusion-branded frame.
Best fit for
NEST is especially beneficial for students who experience anxiety, trauma, sensory sensitivity, or dysregulation in typical classroom settings. It works well for learners who require consistency, co-regulation, and relationship-based pedagogy in order to access learning. This includes many autistic students, students with ADHD, those with developmental trauma, and students with disabilities whose needs are often invisibilised in mainstream settings. NEST also benefits neurotypical students by modelling cooperative learning, empathy, and emotional resilience.
Disability justice alignment
The NEST framework moves beyond the medical model by refusing to frame students as problems to be fixed. Instead, it recognises that distress and dysregulation often arise from inaccessible environments, fractured relationships, and unmet sensory or emotional needs. By embedding access into the environment—rather than waiting for crisis or diagnosis—NEST affirms the disability justice principle that support should be proactive, collective, and relational.
In NEST classrooms, students are not expected to earn accommodations through compliance; they are scaffolded from the start. The model resists punitive logic and performance-based belonging, offering instead a vision of education as care work—slow, relational, and grounded in trust. NEST honours bodily autonomy, protects time for rest and regulation, and treats all behaviour as communication. It creates space for children to unmask, recover, and belong without condition. That is the heart of disability justice: a commitment to interdependence, not assimilation.
Learn more
- About the NYU Nest Support Project
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
- Mia Mingus, “Access Intimacy” (Leaving Evidence blog)
