The Independence Pathway

Five stages. Each one has a written ending.

Most support in this sector has a start date and no finish line. Ours is built the other way round: before a stage begins, we agree in writing what has to be true for it to end. The whole shape of the work is a rise and then a deliberate fall.

Book the 20-minute call See the pathway chart

How to read the shape

Support peaks at stage three, then comes down on purpose.

The honest shape is not a straight descent. Your child needs more of us before they need less of us, and pretending otherwise sets a family up to be disappointed at month three.

Stages 01–02

It goes up slowly

Assessment and planning are light-touch and time-boxed. You are paying for judgement, not hours. If the answer is that your child does not need a programme, this is where we say so.

Stage 03

Then it peaks

Build is the most intensive and most expensive stage. That is correct. Skills are taught here, and under-resourcing this stage is the most common reason a programme drags on for years.

Stages 04–05

Then it falls

Transfer moves skills into real settings and trains the people already there. Step Back reduces our hours in planned steps. Your invoice goes down as your child needs us less.

Stage by stage

What happens, what it costs, when it ends.

Understand

A functional needs assessment across home and school. We watch your child in the places they actually spend their day, and we ask the school what it can realistically deliver with the staff it has. The output is a picture of what your child can already do, what gets in the way, and what triggers what.

Formal diagnosis is not part of this. If your child needs one, we name independent clinicians and you go to them directly.

Fixed fee, standalone
Home and school observation
2–3 weeks

This stage ends when You, the school and we have a written plan all three of us agree with.

You can stop here The assessment is sold on its own and priced on its own. Plenty of families take the report and use it somewhere else. That is a normal outcome, not a failed sale.

Plan

The Independence Plan is one page, written for you rather than for a file. Goals in plain English, the intensity behind each one, which settings the work happens in, a projected timeline, and the dates we will review it. Every practitioner who touches your child works from this page.

The plan also names the providers we think are a better fit for anything we should not be doing — including centres we do not own.

Included with assessment
Written for parents
Reviewed termly

This stage ends when Goals, intensity and review dates are signed off before any support starts.

The check we run Any recommendation above a set intensity needs a second signature from someone with no commercial role. They can send it back.

Build

Clinical intervention and home support, plus coaching for you. This is the stage that teaches the skill, so it carries the most hours and the highest fee. Data is taken against the plan's goals every session, and you can see it in your file the same week.

Coaching you is not an add-on. The strategies have to survive a Tuesday evening at home, or they are not strategies.

Monthly programme fee
Clinical supervision
Data every session

This stage ends when The target skills are reliable in the setting where they were taught.

If it stalls Two consecutive flat reviews trigger a written re-plan, not more hours. Sometimes the honest answer is that the goal was wrong.

Transfer

A supervised learning support assistant works in the classroom while the skills move out of the therapy room and into school life. The teaching team is trained to carry the strategies, and the work is aligned to the school's own IEP rather than running beside it as a second plan nobody reads.

Our LSAs are supervised by the clinician who wrote the goals. They are not an agency placement dropped into a classroom.

Monthly programme fee
Supervised LSA
School team trained

This stage ends when The school team can sustain the support with less of us in the room.

What the school gets A termly written review shared with your SENCO, and a handover plan agreed before we start rather than negotiated on the way out.

Step Back

Support comes down in planned steps as milestones are met — fewer sessions, shorter LSA hours, longer gaps between reviews. Each step is agreed in advance so a reduction never arrives as a surprise. This stage costs you less than the ones before it.

Some children finish here. Others move to a light maintenance arrangement — a review each term and a number to call. Both are successful endings.

Reducing fee
Independence milestones
Discharge or maintenance

This stage ends when Your child manages without us, or at a level your family can hold.

If things change later You come back at the stage you need, not at the beginning. Your file stays open and nothing has to be re-explained.

Fair questions

What if a stage never ends?

Then we have either set the wrong goal or picked the wrong provider, and both of those are our problem to name out loud rather than yours to discover on an invoice.

Two flat reviews force a re-plan

If the data does not move across two consecutive reviews, the plan is rewritten. More hours is not the default response, and it is never the automatic one.

A stage can be handed to someone else

If another provider is better placed for a stage, the plan says so by name. We would rather run four stages well than five badly.

You can leave at the end of any month

No notice penalty, and your file is exported free to whoever you name.

Where this starts

Tell us what you've noticed.

Twenty minutes on the phone with someone who does this every day. No assessment, no cost, and no obligation to become a client at the end of it.

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If we're not the right people, we'll tell you who is. That includes naming providers we don't own, and it costs you nothing either way.