Life for Jayden was hard from the beginning. He was born with biliary atresia, a rare disease that affects about 20 Australian children each year.

The disease destroyed his bile ducts, causing extensive liver damage and leaving him in desperate need of a liver transplant.

Not long after he was born, his parents watched his health fail with every passing day for six months while he was on the waiting list for a transplant. 

Then his father Tom made the tough decision to risk his life and donate a quarter of his liver to save his young son.

“It was hard, I had a wife and two little girls that I had to wake up for,” he said. 

“[Doctors] explained all the risks and I thought about what would happen if I left them behind.”

But the story ends happily with Jayden walking through the school gates of St Mary’s Catholic Primary School for the first time yesterday with mum, Virginia, in tow. 

She held back the tears until she walked out of his classroom.

“Because he’s been so sick, handing him over to someone else to care for him was hard,” she said. 

“When he was really sick it was really hard to see past one day at a time.

“We’re very lucky.”

But Mrs Skrtic knows she left him in good hands and had nothing but praise for how accommodating the school had been towards his special needs.

She said principal Kerrie Basha had contacted Jayden’s specialists in Sydney to discuss what precautions the school should put in place. She then met with the Skrtic family and Jayden’s teacher. 

Jayden needs to be careful about getting hit in the stomach and his immune system is not as good as other five-year-olds, but otherwise he is just as busy as his schoolmates.

Mrs Skrtic said Jayden had the “biggest smile on his face” when he walked out of his classroom and was full of stories from his first day adventures. 

Mrs Skrtic signed up to the organ donation register in the hope that she can help a family avoid going through the uncertainty that plagued the Skrtics. 

“Have the discussion with your family,” she said.