What is a personal budget?

A personal Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities (SEND) budget is money that helps your child with SEND achieve their outcomes. It is based on your child’s assessed needs and written into their Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP).

Depending on the needs of your child, the personal budget can either be a single budget or one that cuts across:

education
health
social care

Once a personal budget is requested and agreed, the EHCP will clearly identify:

where services are being funded from
how budgets will be managed

Children, young people and parents will be at the centre of any discussions. They will be involved in how they would like to see services delivered and how they would like the funding to be managed.

Managing a Personal Budget

There are 3 ways to use a Personal Budget. You can have:

Direct payments: You are given money to buy and manage the services yourself.

An arrangement: No money changes hands and the Local Authority (LA) or school hold the money, but you decide how it is spent. This is sometimes referred to as a notional budget.

Third party arrangement: This is where you choose someone else to manage the money for you.

You can also choose to have a combination of the above.

What is a Direct Payment?

A direct payment is when you are given money to manage services yourself. Sometimes the LA will pay a direct payment to a third party on your behalf.

Direct payments for special educational provision, health care and social care provision are subject to separate regulations.

Detailed arrangements of the direct payment will be detailed within section J of your child’s EHCP.

Asking for a Personal Budget

If you want to request a Personal Budget, you should speak with your child’s school or setting first. The school or setting may:

already have the resource, and be willing to use it with your child
they are already using it and will include your child in the programmes where it is used
feel that it would benefit several children and young people in the school so they will purchase it anyway

If this is not the case, the request for the Personal Budget should come to the LA.

The Personal Budget allocation will come from top up funding identified in the EHCP.

Decision making for Personal Budgets

Decisions about Personal Budget requests are considered by the service area affected, with a final decision made at a multi-disciplinary SEND panel. This will usually be the SEND case panel.

If your request for a Personal Budget isn’t agreed, the LA should:

Write to you and include:
- their decision
- the reasons for their decision
- the right to request a review of the decision
carry out a review of the decision, when asked
let you know the outcome of the review

Different types of Personal Budgets

Education Personal Budgets:

Your child must have an EHCP to get a SEND Personal Budget. A personal budget is optional, you don’t have to have one.

A personal budget for education can be used for things that will support your child to achieve their educational outcomes as set out in their EHCP. Some examples include:

specialist IT equipment
support for communication with others
support to join an educational activity or club
equipment to support access to educational outcomes

Personal Health Budgets:

A Personal Health Budget is an amount of money that is intended to support an individual's health and wellbeing needs. These will be identified and agreed between the individual and the relevant NHS Team.

Personal Health Budgets may be used for continuing health care for children and young people.

A short video about Personal Health Budgets

Jo and her Personal Health Budget from Haltwhistle Film Project on Vimeo.

Social Care Personal Budgets

Local Authorities (LAs) have a duty to offer direct payments for services which they provide.

A personal social care budget can be used for:

help with personal care
help with daily living activities
support to promote independence
supporting employment needs
short stay/respite care
personal Assistant costs
better access to transport
equipment to help you to be as independent as possible or assist you in employment,
other services identified in your support plan