A quote is usually for the visible unit — the session, the school day, the month. Around that unit sits a quantity of real work, and how a provider handles it varies enormously. Ask about all of the following before you sign, and ask in writing.
Time that is not a session
- Report writing. Initial reports, progress reports, reports the school asks for, reports your insurer asks for. Ask which are included and what the rest cost.
- School meetings. Frequently the single most valuable hour anyone spends on your child, and frequently billed by the hour — which quietly discourages you from calling one.
- Phone calls and emails. Some providers include unlimited contact, some bill above a threshold, some bill from the first minute.
- Planning and supervision. The time spent writing your child's plan and reviewing the data. Included in the rate, or an extra line?
Time that does not happen
- School holidays. For classroom support especially — is the arrangement paid across the year or only across term time?
- Your absence. How much notice cancels a session without charge? Illness in a young child is not a rare event and the policy will apply often.
- Their absence. What happens when the therapist is away — a substitute, a credit, or nothing?
- Travel. Charged or absorbed, and does it change outside the emirate the provider is based in?
Costs at the end
These are the ones that matter most and get asked about least, because at the point you sign you are not thinking about leaving.
- Notice period. One month, one term, or a fixed contract you cannot exit.
- Any penalty for ending early.
- Record retrieval. Whether you are charged to obtain your own child's history, and in what format it arrives.
- Re-assessment on return, if you pause and come back.
Record retrieval is the one to press on. A file you cannot take with you is a file that keeps you where you are — and the cost of starting the whole history again with a new provider is far larger than any retrieval fee. Ours exports free, in full, on the day you ask, including the day you leave. Ask everyone else the same question and note who hesitates.
The cost that is not money
There is one more line, and it never appears anywhere. It is the hours you spend coordinating: re-explaining the history at every new appointment, chasing reports between providers who do not talk to each other, and holding the whole picture in your head because nobody else has it.
That work is real, it is exhausting, and in most arrangements it is unpaid and invisible. Whether a provider takes it on is a genuine part of what you are comparing, even though no quote will ever mention it.
One email, sent to everyone
“Please confirm in writing what is included in the fee, and list anything that would be billed separately — reports, meetings, calls, travel, holidays, cancellations, notice period, and any charge to release our records if we leave.”
Any provider worth committing to will answer it in a paragraph. How long it takes them, and how specific it is, tells you more than the answer itself.