How to Start an Educational Therapy Private Practice
- Andrea Chernin
- Jul 30
- 9 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Everybody worries about the logo first. Almost nobody worries about the sentence on their website describing what they are qualified to do, which is the one that actually carries professional risk.
Most advice on how to start an educational therapy private practice is generic small-business content with the word “therapy” dropped in.
The decisions that actually separate an educational therapy practice from any other service business are professional ones: what you are qualified to take on, what has to be agreed in writing before a first session, how client records are handled, and how referrals find you. This guide works through that layer, and traces each obligation to the Association of Educational Therapists document it comes from.
Scope note: business structure, tax and insurance questions are real, and they are not answered here. Those belong with an attorney and an accountant licensed where you practise. What follows is the professional layer that sits on top of them.
Start with what you can accurately claim
The first operating constraint on a new practice is not a business one. AET’s Code of Ethics (Revision #9, September 2025 — full text as published) opens on representation.
Section I.I.A requires members to “accurately represent in an ethical and legal manner their competence, education, training, and experience,” and I.I.C to claim “only those transcripts, documents, and training experiences which they have duly earned.” Section I.I.B limits services to “the boundaries of their competence based on their education, training, supervised and professional experience.”
Read together, those three clauses govern your website copy, your directory entry and your intake conversation as much as they govern your practice. Marketing language is an ethics matter here, not only a conversion matter.
That is also why the level you hold needs stating plainly. AET’s membership levels run Associate ET, then ET/P®, then BCET® — and the Associate ET page describes Associate as an interim step with no stated time limit. The 1,500 direct service hours behind ET/P® are, by definition, accumulated in practice.
So practising while you climb is normal; describing yourself as something you are not is the problem. If you are still mapping that ladder, our guide to how to become an educational therapist sets out each rung and what it requires.
If the title itself is the open question — whether the work you do is educational therapy, learning support or executive function coaching — start with our comparison of educational therapists, learning specialists and executive function coaches. Only one of those three sits on a documented credentialing ladder, and that has direct consequences for what you can put on a shingle.
Choose a practice model before you choose a logo
AET’s career overview describes practitioners working from private offices, from space shared with other professionals, in schools and clinics, and travelling to clients’ homes and schools. Each of those is a different business.
Dedicated or home office. Lowest coordination cost, highest control over the environment and over records. Your catchment is whoever will travel to you.
Shared suite with allied professionals. A psychologist, speech-language pathologist or occupational therapist down the corridor is a referral relationship and a consultation resource in one. It also raises the confidentiality questions covered below sooner rather than later.
Itinerant — homes and school sites. Strong access, weak control. Records travel with you, which makes the technology and storage clauses in your service agreement load-bearing rather than boilerplate.
Virtual or hybrid. AET’s Find an ET directory lets families filter for virtual (e-practice), in-person or hybrid sessions. That filter exists because families search on it.
Pick the model first. Room layout, insurance conversations, record storage and the wording of your agreement all follow from it, and retrofitting them once you have a caseload is considerably more work than deciding now.
Your service agreement is an ethical requirement, not just paperwork
Section I.II of the Code of Ethics requires members to “clearly state, describe, present, and adhere to the conditions of a contract or terms of an agreement prior to the initiation of services.” The operative words are prior to the initiation — the agreement precedes the first session, it does not follow it.
Section I.II.B carries an informed-consent obligation that is easy to miss because it is unusually specific about technology: members must explain “whether and how they intend to use electronic devices or communication technologies to gather, manage, and store client information.” In practice that means your scheduling tool, video platform, note-taking system, cloud storage and messaging channel all belong in the agreement by name.
The agreement is not there to protect you from families. It is there because the terms have to be settled before the work starts, not after.
The same section requires members to “give notice of fee and policy revisions in advance of their implementation,” so a notice period is something to write in at the start rather than negotiate later.
What the agreement needs to settle
Who the client is, and who receives progress reports and session information
Session length, frequency and the expected arc of the work
The fee schedule, and the advance-notice rule for any revision to fees or policies
Cancellation, lateness and non-attendance
The specific technologies used to gather, manage and store information, and where records live
Consent to communicate with schools, physicians and other professionals, and the limits of that consent
How and when services end — section II.I.N.3 frames termination around “the student’s best interests, goodness of fit” and the terms agreed
Decide who you will take, and who you will refer out
A referral list assembled after the intake that needed it is a referral list assembled too late. AET’s fact sheet draws the profession’s boundaries explicitly: educational therapists do not diagnose, do not administer cognitive, intelligence or psychological tests “(unless otherwise qualified),” do not practise psychotherapy and do not prescribe — and should “not be considered tutors.” Section II.II.J of the Code addresses referral to appropriate professionals, and I.I.B keeps you inside your own competence.
Two practical consequences. First, write an intake screen that surfaces the presentations you will decline before a family has paid for an assessment session. Second, build the outbound list — psychologist, neuropsychologist, speech-language pathologist, occupational therapist, psychiatrist, and at least one educational therapist with a specialization you do not hold — while you still have the time to have coffee with each of them.
It is worth being concrete about your own specialization too. Reading, written expression, mathematics and executive function draw on different training, and the approved training programs sequence coursework accordingly. Claiming all four when you were trained in one is exactly the representation problem section I.I.A exists to prevent.
Records, confidentiality, and the retention question
Section II.I.I requires members to “maintain confidentiality of information except where information is released under specific conditions of written consent and/or statutory requirements.” Section III.I requires adherence to “relevant statutes and regulations related to record retention and disposal of records.”
Note what the second of those does not say. AET sets no retention period of its own; it defers to the law where you practise.
So “how long must I keep client files?” is not a question this or any other article can answer for you — it is a question for an attorney in your jurisdiction, and it is worth asking before your first file exists rather than after your hundredth.
What you can settle now, without advice: the format records are kept in, where they are stored and backed up, who besides you can access them, how consent to release is documented, and what the disposal process looks like. Write it down as a policy. A one-practitioner practice with a written records policy scales; one without it accumulates a problem quietly.
Those records also need something to record against. Our guide to how to write an educational therapy treatment plan sets out the nine sections a plan needs — baseline data, measurable goals, the intervention itself, a progress-monitoring plan, written decision rules, and review and exit criteria.
The documentation you will wish you had started on day one
If you are working toward ET/P®, your practice’s record-keeping is also your credential evidence. The ET/P® requirements call for 1,500 direct service hours completed within the past ten years, evidenced by signed letters of verification, alongside supervision with a BCET® at a 1:10 ratio of hours. Reconstructing a decade of hours retroactively is the step practitioners consistently underestimate.
Board certification compounds it. The BCET® requirements add a further 1,000 hours of clinical practice on top of the 1,500, plus a written case study drawn from actual client work spanning one to two years, assessed by a team of five trained readers, and a four-hour ethics examination.
A case study that spans two years has to be chosen and documented near the start of those two years — which is a practice-management decision, not an application decision.
So: a client log with dates, durations, service type and supervisor sign-off, running from client one. It costs nothing to start and cannot be recreated later.
Getting found
AET’s Find an ET directory lists Associate, ET/P®, BCET® and Allied Professional members, and lets families refine by specialization, by session language, and by whether sessions are virtual, in person or hybrid.
Your entry is therefore a search-and-match document, not a biography — precise specializations beat comprehensive ones, and the representation rules in I.I.A and I.I.C apply to it exactly as they apply to your website.
The Allied Professional membership category is also a useful map of the association’s orbit: psychologists, neuropsychologists, social workers, speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists. Those are your referral sources and your referral destinations, and they are reachable through the same association you are joining.
Beyond the directory, the referral relationships that sustain a practice tend to come from school-based staff, pediatricians and diagnosticians who need somewhere to send a family after an evaluation.
What they want to know is narrow: who you take, what you do, and what you will send back to them. Our overview of what educational therapy changes for a student is the kind of plain explanation worth having ready for a referrer who is not in the field.
Budget for the obligations that recur
These are operating costs, not startup costs, and they are the ones new practices most often leave out of the first year’s planning:
AET dues of $225 a year at both Associate and ET/P® level, plus a one-time $35 application processing fee at Associate
Ten hours of continuing education annually — and the CE requirements page specifies that a minimum of five of those must come from AET-sponsored professional development
An AET Ethics Workshop, worth three CE hours, every three years
Supervision fees while working toward ET/P®; AET states these are mutually decided between supervisor and supervisee rather than set centrally
The $100 ethics examination fee, if and when you reach BCET®
Coursework, if you are still completing it — the CSUN post-master’s certificate and the NDNU online MA are both AET-approved routes, with their own tuition and admission requirements
Members attest to meeting the CE requirement in the twelve months preceding renewal, and anyone selected for audit has thirty days from notification to produce documentation. That is a filing habit, not a scramble.
A sensible first ninety days
Fix your scope and your level statement in writing. One paragraph you can paste into a website, a directory entry and an intake email without editing it. If the three versions differ, the loosest one is the one you will be held to.
Draft the service agreement and consent form, including the technology clause and the advance-notice rule on fee and policy revisions.
Settle records before there are any. Format, storage, backup, access, consent-to-release, disposal. Take the retention period to an attorney in your state.
Build the referral list. Names and contact details, not categories.
Set up hours logging in the format ET/P® verification will eventually ask for.
Take the business questions to licensed professionals. The SBA’s guide to choosing a business structure, and the IRS pages on sole proprietorships, steps for new business owners and when an EIN is required, are starting points for that conversation — not substitutes for it.
Complete your AET directory entry with precise specializations and your actual session formats.
Then market. Not before the six items above exist, because every one of them is something a first client will ask you to produce.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be ET/P® before I can open a practice?
AET’s ethical obligation is accurate representation and working inside your competence, not a specific membership level. Associate ET is described as an interim step with no stated time limit, and the 1,500 direct service hours required for ET/P® are accumulated through practice — so practising at Associate level is the ordinary route. State your level accurately wherever you describe yourself.
What has to be in writing before the first session?
Section I.II of the Code of Ethics requires the conditions of the contract or terms of agreement to be stated, described, presented and adhered to “prior to the initiation of services.” Section I.II.B adds informed consent covering, specifically, the electronic devices and communication technologies used to gather, manage and store client information.
How long do I have to keep client records?
AET does not set a period. Section III.I directs members to the relevant statutes and regulations on record retention and disposal, which vary by jurisdiction. This is a question for a lawyer where you practise.
Can I call myself an educational therapist while I am still completing coursework?
Sections I.I.A and I.I.C require you to represent your competence, education, training and experience accurately, and to claim only what you have duly earned. Describe the level you actually hold — Associate ET, ET/P® or BCET® — rather than the one you are working toward.
Does the AET directory accept practitioners who are not yet board certified?
Yes. The Find an ET directory lists Associate, ET/P® and BCET® members alongside Allied Professional members.
What about insurance and billing?
Deliberately out of scope here. Professional liability cover and any question of third-party billing depend on your jurisdiction and your business structure, and they belong with an insurance broker and an accountant rather than with an article.
Where to go from here
Illuminate keeps a list for educational therapists, learning specialists and executive function coaches — new practitioner resources as they publish, and student matching for practitioners taking referrals. Join the educator list.
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