Occupational therapists, self-regulation, and primary schools: A scoping review.

Only seven peer-reviewed papers and five dissertations met the criteria, so this maps a small and emerging literature rather than summarising a body of trials. The primary studies were generally small and few were controlled: of the seven, only one used a randomised design, and others were pilots, pre-post designs or a descriptive analysis of existing data. Only papers published in English were included, so relevant work published in other languages is missing. Papers about one specific condition or neurotype, such as autism, and papers set in special schools were deliberately excluded, so nothing here speaks to condition-specific or specialist-school self-regulation work. No study measured self-regulation directly, so the review describes what therapists called and measured, not whether any intervention changed children's self-regulation. Counting how often a term appeared in a paper's introduction was done pragmatically and was not checked against a known standard, so those counts are a rough signal rather than a measurement. No protocol was registered, so the review plan was not fixed in advance.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Three of the four authors are occupational therapists and one is a psychologist; two authors currently work in paediatrics supporting children, families and school teams with self-regulation, and the review forms part of the first author's doctoral research. No funding source is stated in the text supplied.

Do not read this as evidence that the Alert Program® or the Zones of Regulation® works. The review only recorded which programmes therapists used and what they measured; since none of the included studies measured self-regulation directly, it cannot tell you whether any programme changed children's regulation or their participation at school.