What practitioner training covers, and who it is for

Working shadow teachers and special educators who want structure behind their experience. Teachers and teaching assistants moving into one-to-one support. Graduates in psychology, education or a related field who want to work with families. Therapy-centre staff who are asked to support children between sessions. And, in a separate strand, parents and family members who are the child's main support at home and want to do it well.

It is not for people looking for a job abroad. The programme trains practitioners to work with families and schools in India, and Special Minds introduces its trained practitioners to families here.

Six areas. How children with autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, speech and language delay, Down syndrome and sensory processing differences experience the day, and what each usually needs from the adult beside them. How to carry a therapist's plan into ordinary moments without pretending to be the therapist. How to work in a classroom as a shadow teacher: sitting beside a child without standing between them and the class, working to the teacher's instruction and the school's plan. Structured teaching at home: routines, visual supports, small steps, daily-living skills. Safeguarding, boundaries and the code of conduct. And recording and reporting: the daily note, the monthly report, the meeting with the coordinator.

Small groups, in person where a city has enough practitioners and online where it does not. Short sessions, practical and specific, with real scenarios from real placements, names changed. Practice between sessions, in the practitioner's own placement or in a supervised one. Feedback from a supervisor who has done the work. A practitioner is asked to show what they can do, not to describe it, and to talk honestly about the placement that went wrong.

Training that stops at the classroom door does not change what happens at the dining table. Practitioners in the programme are supervised in a real placement: a supervisor reviews the daily record, joins a school meeting, watches a session, and talks through what happened. The supervision continues after the training, for practitioners placed by Special Minds, through the first-week, thirty-day and term reviews of every placement.

It is not a therapy qualification and does not make anyone a therapist. It does not qualify anyone to assess or diagnose. It does not replace a special-education degree or a teaching qualification, and practitioners who have those are asked to bring them. It does not promise work, in India or anywhere else. What it does is give a practitioner a method, a standard and a supervisor, and give families a way to know what the person beside their child has been trained to do.

A practitioner who has been through the programme knows where the role ends. They arrive able to build a visual schedule, carry a speech-language pathologist's target into a meal, sit beside a child in a full classroom, brief the household and write a report the school can use. They have been watched doing it. Families who ask us for a trained practitioner are asking for that, and we say plainly in each candidate's file whether they have been through the programme, are in it, or bring their standard from elsewhere.