Support in the Classroom,
Built to Be Withdrawn
Camali Clinic provides professional school shadowing designed to help a child maximise learning, develop independence, build social skills and integrate into their school. The measure of a good shadow is how little the child needs them by the end.
What a shadow does
Our shadows implement individualised strategies, support behaviour management, assist with peer interaction, and help children generalise the skills learned in therapy to the classroom setting. Skills that hold in a therapy room and collapse in a classroom have not really been learned yet; closing that gap is the work.
Support runs in school and, where it helps, in community settings, the places a child actually has to manage.
The long-term aim is to gradually fade support as the child gains independence.
Three service models
Families arrive at this page from three different starting points, so there are three ways in.
Shadow Hire Only
You have your own supervision arrangement in place and need the person. Camali provides a trained shadow to work in the classroom alongside your existing clinical oversight.
Shadow Placement: full recruitment and management
Camali recruits, trains, supervises and manages the shadow end to end, including cover and performance. The family and the school deal with one clinic rather than with an individual.
Clinical Supervision for an RBT Shadow
You already have a shadow, and what is missing is the clinical layer above them. A BCBA or BCaBA takes on case supervision, so the strategies in the classroom stay aligned with the child’s programme.
How the service works
Supervision and behaviour support
Regular case supervision by a BCBA or BCaBA ensures high-quality ABA intervention in line with international standards. Where supervision is provided by Camali, a School Behaviour Support Plan is developed from the child’s IEP.
IEP support
Camali does not develop the full IEP. Where the school asks, we support the SEN team in developing it. The plan stays the school’s, and our contribution is clinical input into it.
Daily progress notes
Shadows provide daily updates, written or verbal, setting out the strategies used, the progress made and the feedback from the classroom.
Weekly supervisor feedback
Supervisors review goals and progress each week and adjust where the data says to. A plan nobody revisits is a plan that stops fitting the child.
Working with the school
A shadow is a guest in a classroom that belongs to somebody else. We agree the arrangement with the SEN team before anyone starts: who the shadow reports to day to day, how feedback travels in both directions, what the teacher can ask the shadow to do and what they cannot.
Schools already working with Camali on assessments or in-school therapy can keep the same point of contact. See support services for schools.
Camali Clinic is committed to providing structured, ethical and individualised support to help each child succeed at school and develop long-term independence.
Fading the support
Every placement is written with its own ending in mind. Goals are set so they can be met; supervision checks not only whether the child is doing better with the shadow, but whether they are needing the shadow less.
Fading is gradual and planned: a level of prompting reduced, a lesson without support, a break time managed alone, and it is reviewed rather than assumed. A child who has been shadowed for three years without a fading plan has been given a habit rather than a skill.
Getting started
1.Tell us about the child and the setting
The age, the school, the year group, what support is already in place and what the school has asked for. Please keep it to that. Reports and assessments are shared later, through a clinical route rather than a website form.
2.Agree the model
We will say which of the three models fits, and be plain if what you need is supervision rather than a shadow, or the other way round.
3.Meet the school
A shadow works inside somebody else’s classroom. The arrangement is agreed with the school’s SEN team before anybody starts, including who the shadow reports to day to day.
4.Start, review, and plan the fade
Support begins with goals written down and a review cycle attached. The first review is not about whether the shadow is settling in. It is about what has to be true for the shadow to step back.
Independence, not attendance
A shadow who is still beside the same child in the same way a year later has not failed the child by being there, but the plan has failed if nobody ever asked what it would take for them to step away.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. A teaching assistant supports a class; a shadow supports one child, works to that child’s individual goals, and is supervised clinically. The two roles can sit alongside each other in the same classroom.
Yes. A shadow works inside the school’s classroom and under the school’s policies, so the arrangement is made with the SEN team before it starts. Where a school has its own shadowing policy, that policy leads.
That is not the intention. The service is designed so support fades as the child gains independence. The goals are written to be met and then withdrawn from, and the reviews check whether that is happening.
Yes. That is the third model. A BCBA or BCaBA takes on case supervision of your existing RBT so that what happens in the classroom matches the child’s clinical programme.
No. Camali does not develop the full IEP. We can support the school’s SEN team in developing it when asked, and where we supervise we build a School Behaviour Support Plan from the IEP the school has written.
It depends on the model, the hours and the level of supervision. Tell us the setting and we will come back with the options and the costs rather than a single figure that would not fit.
Talk to us about shadowing
Tell us about the child, the school and what support is already in place. We will come back with the model that fits and what it involves.
Looking for assessments, staff training or in-school therapy instead? Those live on support services for schools.
If someone is in immediate danger, use the appropriate UAE emergency service rather than this form. See our Referral and Emergency information.