About the money
1. Is anyone's pay affected by how many hours you recommend?
A good answer is one sentence and slightly boring. "No, assessors are salaried" or "yes, our therapists are paid per session, so recommendations are signed off by someone who isn't." Both are fine. What matters is that they know the answer immediately.
The evasion: "We would never let that influence clinical judgement." That is a statement about intentions, and you asked about incentives.
2. What does the invoice look like in twelve months if things go well?
A good answer says it goes down, and explains the mechanism. If a provider cannot describe a scenario where their revenue from your family falls, the model has no route to an ending.
The evasion: a description of what your child will have achieved. That is not what you asked.
3. What am I charged for outside sessions?
Reports, phone calls, school meetings, emails, travel. Ask for the list. A per-item model is not wrong, but it does quietly discourage you from asking for the coordination you most need.
4. What happens if we want to stop?
A good answer covers notice, any penalty, and what happens to your records. The one to listen for: whether you are charged to retrieve your own child's history. Some providers do charge for this. It is worth knowing before, not after.
About the plan
5. What would have to be true for this support to end?
The single most useful question in the list. A good answer describes a condition: "when she is managing the transition into class without an adult present, across two consecutive weeks."
The evasion: a duration ("we usually see families for about two years"), or a redirect to individual difference. Every child is different — which is an argument for writing a specific criterion, not for declining to.
6. What would you expect to see in eight weeks?
You are asking them to make a prediction they can be held to. A good answer is concrete and hedged appropriately. A weak one is unfalsifiable — "progress varies," "we should start to see engagement improve."
Write the answer down. Bring it to the eight-week review. This one habit will tell you more about a provider than everything else on this page.
7. What would you do if there were no progress at all?
A good answer involves rewriting the plan, re-examining the goal, or referring on. A concerning one is increasing hours. If more of the same is the default response to the same not working, nothing can ever fail.
8. Who supervises the person actually working with my child?
Particularly for classroom assistants and shadow teachers. A good answer names a person, a frequency, and what they look at.
The evasion: "all our staff are highly experienced." Experience is not supervision. An unsupervised assistant with written targets is a risk; an unsupervised assistant with no targets is a placement, not a service.
About honesty
9. What proportion of the children you assess do not become your clients?
Almost nobody publishes this. A good answer is a number, or an honest "we don't measure that, but here is roughly how often it happens and here is a recent example."
The tell: visible discomfort, or an answer implying that essentially everyone assessed needs their programme. Populations are not that uniform.
10. Can you show me a plan where you recommended someone else?
Redacted, obviously. A good answer produces one, or explains specifically why they cannot. A weak one asserts that of course they would, without ever having done it.
11. Do you receive or pay any referral fees?
In either direction — to schools, from clinics, to anyone. A good answer is immediate and unambiguous. This is common practice in some markets and it materially changes whose interests a referral serves. You are entitled to know.
How to use the answers
Do not score them. Almost no provider will answer all eleven perfectly, and a provider who is defensive about one question may be excellent at the work.
What you are actually looking for is a pattern:
- Specific and checkable — even where the answer is uncomfortable. This is the good sign.
- Unfalsifiable — warm, reassuring, and impossible to be wrong about. This is the one to worry about.
- Irritated — worth noticing. You are going to be asking harder questions than these in eighteen months.
One more, for yourself
After the meeting, try to explain the plan to someone who was not there, in two sentences. If you cannot, it is not because you did not follow — it is because it was not explained clearly enough to act on.
Go back and ask again. Any provider worth committing to will be glad you did.