Terms of Engagement
Version 1.0. Published 24th September 2026.1. Who we are
Welham Autism Centre Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 17157339. Registered office: Bartle House, Oxford Court, Manchester M2 3WQ. You can contact us at info@welhamautismcentre.co.uk.
2. What we provide
We provide autism diagnostic assessments for children and young people aged 3 to 18.
The initial consultation is a one-hour online appointment with a senior clinician to discuss your child, decide together whether a full assessment is the right step, and explain what it involves.
The full assessment includes a developmental history interview, a structured observation using the ADOS-2, information gathered from your child's school, any further questionnaires we consider useful, a discussion between clinicians, a feedback meeting with you, and a written report.
3. What we do not provide
So that expectations are clear from the start, we do not provide: ongoing therapy or intervention; prescribing or medication reviews; assessments for ADHD or other conditions as a standalone service; advocacy at EHCP tribunals or other legal proceedings; or any decision about your child's school placement or support, which rests with your school and local authority.
4. Fees and payment
Initial consultation: £150, payable when you book.
Full assessment: £2,000. We invoice this after the initial consultation, and it is payable before the assessment begins.
Total for a complete assessment pathway: £2,150.
The assessment fee covers everything listed in section 2, including the feedback meeting and one electronic copy of the report. We do not charge extra for liaising with your child's school about the findings. Additional or reissued copies of the report are free within 12 months of issue.
5. Your right to cancel
Because you book with us online, you have a legal right to cancel within 14 days of booking and receive a full refund, without giving a reason. To cancel, email us.
If you ask us to provide the consultation or assessment within that 14-day period (which most families do, because waiting is the thing we're trying to spare you) you will be asked to confirm that you want us to start straight away and that you understand you will lose the right to cancel once we have fully delivered that service. If you cancel partway through, you will be charged for what we have already done.
6. Changing or cancelling an appointment after that
Once the 14-day period has passed, we ask for at least five working days' notice to move or cancel an appointment. With that notice we'll rearrange at no cost. With less, we may keep the fee for that appointment, because we will usually not be able to offer the slot to another family.
We understand that children are not always able to take part on the day. Tell us what's happened and we will be reasonable about it.
If we cancel or postpone, we'll offer you the earliest alternative appointment, or a full refund of anything you've paid for work not yet done.
7. Information from your child's school
Part of an autism assessment is understanding how your child is outside the home, and we need an account from a teacher (can be other roles in some circumstances) who knows them well and sees them now or has done recently. For most children we will not be able to reach a final diagnostic conclusion without it.
How we get it: your choice. Either:
give us the school email address of the right person and let them know to expect us, and we'll contact them directly; or
we'll send you a link to pass to the teacher yourself.
If the school doesn't respond. Where we've had no reply after six weeks of term time (the clock pauses over school holidays) we'll ask you instead for your child's written school reports, and work from those.
If school information is needed and never arrives. We'll complete every other part of the assessment and give you a written summary of our findings. It will state plainly that we were not able to reach a diagnostic conclusion, and why. The assessment fee remains payable, because the work has been done. If the missing information reaches us within 12 months, we'll finish the assessment and issue the full report at no further cost.
You can check with school first. If you'd like to confirm your school will take part before committing to a full assessment please do, we'd rather you knew than hoped.
8. Outcomes
We cannot guarantee any particular outcome, and the fee is payable regardless of it. An assessment is an investigation, not a product: concluding that your child is not autistic is a legitimate and valuable result, and takes the same work as concluding that they are. Where that happens we will still give you a full profile of your child's strengths and needs, our reasoning, and recommendations, including anything else we think is worth exploring.
9. Your report and other organisations
Our reports are written to be used. We map our findings explicitly to the diagnostic criteria, we set out what would help, and we will liaise directly with your child's school.
We should be straightforward with you, though: a private diagnosis does not oblige a school, a local authority or the NHS to provide any particular support, and some services apply their own criteria before accepting an external report. We can't promise how a third party will respond to ours.
10. Safeguarding and confidentiality
What you tell us is confidential. The exception is where we believe a child is at risk of harm, in which case we have a duty to share that with the appropriate agency, and we may have to do so without your agreement. Our safeguarding statement explains how we approach this.
11. If something goes wrong
Please tell us. Our complaints procedure sets out how we handle complaints and how quickly we'll respond.
12. Our responsibility to you
We will carry out our work with the reasonable care and skill you are entitled to expect of qualified, registered clinicians. We don't limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. Otherwise our liability in connection with an assessment is limited to the fees you have paid for it. Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.
13. Changes and governing law
These terms are the ones in force when you book, and we won't change them partway through your assessment. They are governed by the law of England and Wales.