ABA
A framework for teaching skills by breaking them into steps, prompting, reinforcing and measuring. Widely used in the UAE, genuinely effective for some goals, and the subject of real criticism worth understanding before you buy it.
Why ABA matters.
ABA is a method, not a product, and the quality range between two providers both calling their work ABA is enormous. The useful questions are about supervision, data and endings rather than about the label.
There is also a serious critique of it, much of it from autistic adults, aimed at programmes built around suppressing harmless behaviour and producing compliance. That critique is worth taking seriously. A programme that teaches a child to communicate a refusal is doing something different from one that teaches a child not to refuse.
Questions that get a real answer
- Who supervises the therapist working with my child, and how often?
- What is being taught, and what is being suppressed?
- How many hours a week, and what is that number based on?
- What would make you reduce the hours?
Ask these of anyone, including us. What you are listening for is not the right answer — it is whether the answer is specific enough to be wrong.
Terms that usually turn up alongside it.
Access arrangements
Adjustments a school makes so a child can show what they know — extra time, a reader, a separate room. They
GlossaryADEK
The authority regulating schools in Abu Dhabi emirate, including Al Ain and the Al Dhafra region. It
GlossaryBaseline
What a child can do before support starts, measured rather than described. Without one, nobody can prove
Send it to us and we'll translate it.
Any report, from any provider, including ones we have nothing to do with. We will tell you in plain English what it says, what it recommends, and which parts are actually supported by the evidence in it. No charge, and it does not make you a client.