Personal Budgets & Direct Payments
If your child has an EHC plan, the Local Authority must ensure the support set out in the plan is made for them. Normally, the LA will do this by providing the necessary funding to your child’s school or college.
However, it is also possible for the LA to consider making a payment to you (as a parent or young person), or another nominated person, so that you can organise the provision yourself. This is called a direct payment. In order for you to request a direct payment, the LA must first identify a personal budget.
Personal budgets are optional, so you do not have to have one. If you would like the LA to identify a personal budget you can make a request for it to do so. You can do this when the LA issues a draft EHC plan following an EHC needs assessment or reassessment, or when it is reviewing an EHC plan. It is not legally required to consider identifying a personal budget for educational provision at other times.
A personal budget is an amount of money identified by the LA to deliver some or all of the provision set out in an EHC plan, where the parent or young person is involved in securing that provision. Its purpose is to give families more control over the services and support they receive.
If you do request a personal budget from your LA, you can at the same time ask it to identify which parts of the personal budget you could then receive as a direct payment, so that you could commission or arrange the provision in the EHC plan yourself. The direct payment must be enough to cover the cost of arranging the provision.
Personal budgets and direct payments are optional for families. However, the LA must prepare a personal budget if asked to do so when a draft EHC plan is being prepared or at the annual review of an existing plan.
“Local authorities must provide information on Personal Budgets as part of the Local Offer. This should include a policy on Personal Budgets that sets out a description of the services across education, health and social care that currently lend themselves to the use of Personal Budgets, how that funding will be made available, and clear and simple statements of eligibility criteria and the decision-making processes.”
Direct payments for health, education and social care provision are governed by different pieces of legislation, and can be refused for different reasons but they must tell you why.
Please go to the IPSEA website to read more about personal budgets and direct payments.