Questions to Ask Every NDIS Provider — What We Wish We'd Known From Day One

The Five Questions at a Glance

If you're short on time, here are the five questions every NDIS parent should ask new providers — before the first session, not after.

1. Specific experience: What's your specific experience with my child's actual presentation? Not autism generally — non-verbal autism, sensory processing, ADHD with autism, whatever your child's reality actually is.
2. Flexibility: What do you do when a child doesn't engage with the activity you've planned?
3. Billing transparency: How much of each session is direct therapy versus admin? Are reports written during the session or after?
4. Travel and cancellation: What's your travel charge policy? What's your cancellation policy?
5. Fit signals: How will I know in the first session or two whether you're the right person for my child?

Read on for the stories behind each one — and what we've learned the hard way.

Nobody hands you a checklist when you start the NDIS journey.

You learn the questions by getting them wrong. You sit through sessions that don't work. You open invoices that surprise you. You sit in the car afterwards wondering if what you just paid for was actually therapy.

Here are the questions I wish someone had told me to ask before our first session with anyone.

"Experience With Autism" Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

This is the one I wish I'd known to ask first.

When a provider says they have "experience with autism," parents take that at face value. We did. We assumed it meant they understood autism the way they were claiming to. But "experience with autism" can mean almost anything. It can mean "I worked with one autistic kid five years ago." It can mean "60% of my caseload is autistic and I'm trained to work in a way that respects how autistic kids actually think."

Those are not the same thing. And the difference matters when you're the parent of a child who can't tell you whether the therapy is working.

Here's the harder truth. Autism is a spectrum so wide that two autistic kids can be completely different. Two parents can take their autistic children to the same provider and have very different experiences. Not because the provider is good or bad. The children just present so differently that the same approach can't work for both.

So "experience with autism" is the wrong question. The right question is more specific:

What's your specific experience with my child's actual presentation?

For us, that means: have you worked with non-verbal autistic children? How many? What did that look like in practice? What changed in your approach when you couldn't rely on the child telling you what was working?

Most providers can't answer this question without exposing how thin their actual experience is. The ones who can answer it well are usually the ones worth working with.

If you're trying to find a speech pathologist or OT who genuinely understands neurodivergent kids, our experience with 15 speech therapists covers what to look for.

A Good Provider Is A Translator, Not A Transmitter

The best analogy I've come up with is teaching.

A good teacher isn't someone who knows their subject. A good teacher is someone who can translate their subject for the specific child in front of them. A teacher who can only teach one way will fail every child who doesn't fit that way of learning.

Providers are the same. The good ones translate. The rigid ones transmit.

I remember when Rocco was at kindy. He had a speech therapist who would come in to work with him. I spoke to her and to the kindy teachers afterwards, and what kept coming up was this:

When Rocco gave up on whatever task they were doing and moved to something else, she just went with it. She'd let go of the plan and follow what he was interested in at that moment. She'd find a way to do the speech work inside whatever activity he'd chosen. She didn't try to force him back into hers.

Rocco responded to that. The kindy teachers noticed it. And the speech therapist seemed to take it completely in her stride, like that's just what she always did.

That's the difference. That's translation.

Plenty of providers have the right credentials. Plenty have years of experience. What separates the ones who genuinely help is whether they can adapt when the child in front of them doesn't fit the textbook. Education is good. Rigidity is the red flag.

So the question to ask is some version of:

What do you do when a child doesn't engage with the activity you've planned?

Listen carefully to the answer. If they talk about ways to redirect the child or get them back on task, that's transmission. If they talk about following the child's lead and finding the therapy inside whatever the child is already doing, that's translation.

What Are You Actually Paying For?

This is the question I really wish someone had told me to ask before signing anything.

NDIS billing is opaque to parents at first. There are surprises waiting in places you wouldn't think to look.

The one that floored me: report writing happening inside the session.

You book a one-hour speech therapy session. You assume your child is getting one hour of therapy. Then you find out that 15 minutes of that hour is the therapist writing the report. So your child is getting 45 minutes of therapy. You're paying for an hour.

That's a quarter of every session. Every week. For months. For something that should be done in the therapist's own time.

A doctor wouldn't do this. A doctor wouldn't book you for an hour and then spend the last 15 minutes writing their notes while you watch. But it happens often in allied health. Parents don't realise until they've already paid for months of it.

The answers matter less than the willingness to give them. A provider who's open about their billing is a provider you can probably trust. A provider who's vague or defensive about it is a warning sign.

We learned this the hard way during our four OTs in four years — billing transparency was one of the first signals of who was worth staying with.

How You Know — And How Long You Wait

Here's something I've changed my mind about over the years.

Early on, we'd give a provider months before deciding it wasn't working. We'd second-guess ourselves. We'd assume the problem was us. Or Rocco having a bad day. Or that good therapy just takes time to show results.

Now I don't wait. If we go to a provider once, sometimes twice, and Rocco isn't responding (or worse, is responding in a negative way), we don't go back.

That feels harsh written down. But staying longer doesn't help anyone. The therapy isn't working for Rocco. The provider can't help if the fit isn't there. And every week you stay is money and time you're not spending on finding the right person.

The kindy speech therapist passed every one of those signs without needing to be told. That's what fit looks like. You can usually tell within a session or two.

Why I Wrote This

None of this advice would help us with the providers who didn't work out. That's behind us now.

But it might help a family who's just starting. The first NDIS year is hard enough without paying months of fees to providers who were never going to help. The questions in this post are the ones I wish someone had handed me when Rocco was first diagnosed.

And honestly, we're still asking these questions. Rocco is seven. We've been doing this for years. The providers change. The questions sharpen. The answers we're looking for are still the same. Someone who has real experience with kids who present like Rocco. Someone who can adapt their approach when the textbook doesn't fit. Someone who's straight with us about what we're paying for.

That person exists. The good ones are out there. You just have to ask the right questions to find them.

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