School Visits

--- title: School Visits updated: 2024-08-08T13:09:59 created: 2024-04-30T16:44:53 ---

School Visits Last Updated 10/7/2024

The dept of education has released new guidelines about external providers coming into schools, which are making it harder for us to go into schools to deliver therapy.

In a nutshell: -schools can charge room fees, but we CAN'T charge them on to the client -we can't observe children in the classroom setting at all -we have to provide certified copies of our blue cards, Aphra reg, plus cert copies of both company and personal insurance details before we can access the school. -there is mandatory access to schools training that must be completed. -staff need to have line of sight over the child and AHP during therapy. (not in the same room, but close by) -lastly, principals have the right to say no on the grounds of disruption to school admin burden etc, and only say yes where therapy can't be delivered anywhere else. For private schools kindys etc. my understanding is they can follow these guidelines but they're not mandatory. So sometimes they'll just give us permission without any other caveats. Bearing all this in mind , we are happy to do school and kindy visits, but the client MUST get permission from the school in writing first. This gives the school the chance to ask for all the things they need, and us to deliver them. We WILL charge the family for the time spent organising this bureaucracy. We will also charge for travel time to the school from clinic.

We can't commence any sessions until this permission is in place.

We can't do ANY classroom observations within school hours when other kids are around (not our choice)

We therefore strongly encourage them to have the initial assessment in one of our clinics - the practitioner can then reiterate the processes for getting permissions from the school, and work out what needs to be done.

Plus we can hopefully show them how amazing our clinics are so they come to us instead....