Personal Budgets for Children and Young People with SEND and their Carers/Parents

A Personal Budget is money given by the Local Authority to pay for provision set out in an EHC plan.

What is a Personal Budget?

You can apply for a Personal Budget if you or your child have an EHC plan. This is funding that goes towards achieving some or all of the outcomes in the plan.

An EHC plan is a statutory document. This means that the provision it states legally has to be fulfilled. To find out more about EHC plans, visit out EHC plan pages. You may be able to have a Personal Budget as part of this to help cover the costs of the support you or your child needs. If you are 16 or older you can control your own Personal Budget.

Personal Budgets aim to give you more control over how to meet the outcomes set out in the EHC plan. It allows you to have more flexibility over the services you or your child use. The money you are awarded can only be used on things that will help achieve EHC plan outcomes.

Direct Payments and Personal Budgets

Personal Budgets and Direct Payments are not the same thing. While you are given money to spend yourself with a Direct Payment, this is not the case for a Personal Budget. You can tell the Local Authority how you would like your Personal Budget to be split up. This means that you do not have to pay for the services or manage the money yourself if you don't want to.

Money for Personal Budgets

Personal Budgets come from funding that the services already have agreed to. This means that it is important that the funding is used in the best way to meet the needs of the individual.

Types Of Personal Budget

Education Personal Budget

There are three elements that make up support for a young person in Education.

Element 1 - Covers mainstream education. This includes services that all children can access. Each education setting will receive direct funding for places at that setting.

Element 2 - Provides targeted services and support. Each education setting is provided with an allocated amount of SEND funding. They are expected to spend £6000 to provide support that meets the needs of any young people at the setting who require it.

Element 3 - This is known as 'top-up' or specialist funding. The Local Authority keeps this and allocates it to provide support for individual young people. This funding is what is available to use in Personal Budgets and depends on the cost to the Local Authority for the services. The Personal Budget given for this replaces the Local Authorities provision for outcomes.

Personal Budgets are only taken from Element 3. Support is not allocated to individuals from the other elements.

Social Care Personal Budget

Social Care provides packages to meet the needs of each young person. They provide a purpose for this package and what they aim to achieve with it. You can use a Social Care budget on anything you want to meet this aim, but this has to be agreed with them.

You will work with Social Care to agree on how to use your or your child's Personal Budget. You can discuss your ideas with them and they can help you to finance these. This will help you to create a Personal Budget support plan.

This support plan can be flexible and change. It will be reviewed often so that it continues to meet every individual’s needs.

You can have your Social Care Personal Budgets delivered in two ways.

Direct Payments - You can have this paid to you monthly or in a one-off payment. By receiving your Personal Budget as a Direct Payment, you will have to pay for the services yourself.

Commissioned Services - You can choose to have your Personal Budget as a Commissioned Service. This means the Local Authority will pay for any services on your behalf.

Personal Health Budget

A Personal Health Budget is money to support health and wellbeing needs a young person has. You will work with the local NHS team to agree this. Personal Health Budgets work in a similar way to Direct Payments. You may already be using these for social care and will help you to have more control over support for your health.

Similar to Social Care, you will discuss your Personal Health support plan with healthcare professionals. This allows your estimated budget to be adjusted to meet your individual needs and outcomes. It is important to note that your Personal Budget could be more or less than this amount.

How much you can get

When an EHC plan is being drafted, it is estimated how much the support required will cost. This depends on the outcomes stated in the plan. This helps to give an idea of how much you may get in a Personal Budget.

Some people may have funding from Education, Social Care and/or Health services. When you or your child receives from more than one of these it may be possible to combine them. This creates a single budget which can help to better support you or your child's needs and outcomes.

To find out more, watch the Personal Budgets video on YouTube [External Link] or view Sutton's SEND Personal Budgets Policy. To find an easy read guide, visit the Sutton website [External Link].

How can you use your Personal Budget?

What a Personal Budget can be used for

A personal Budget must be used towards achieving the outcome in your or your child's EHC plan. You cannot have a Personal Budget unless you have an EHC plan. This is because a Personal Budget is an amount of money that is needed to cover provision stated within an EHC plan.

You can use a Personal Budget for many things. For example, you could use a SEND Personal Budget to build on learning support and fund specialist services. You could also buy assistive technology or equipment needed to support learning outcomes. You could even use it towards work experience if this relates to an outcome stated in your EHC plan.

A Social Care Personal Budget can be used to pay towards short breaks for you or your child. A Personal Budget allows you to decide how much you want to spend on each service and how they can work together.

What a Personal Budget cannot be used for

You cannot use a Personal Budget for anything that is illegal or would put anyone involved in danger. You also can not use a Personal Budget to pay off any debts.

Money for a Personal Budget comes from the services that would have been paid for by the Local Authority. Funding for things such as school placements and health professionals cannot be released for Personal Budgets.

Not all services are able to release funding to do this. If they do, they may not be able to provide the service for others who need it. One place that this could happen is in schools as they may have block contracts services run there. This means they have a set amount to spend on the service. If this is the case, you would not be able to use a Personal Budget for these. Any block contracts in place are kept under review.

You have a safeguarding responsibility when using a Personal Budget to buy services. Before a Personal Budget is agreed, you will meet with professionals to discuss this. The Local Authority cannot enforce that you undertake checks of a service, but it is recommended you do.

If you use a Personal Budget for equipment, it is your responsibility to make sure it is used safely. For example, if you can connect it to the internet, you would have to set up any parental controls needed.

Other Information and Advice

To find out more about Direct Payments if you choose to use them, read Sutton's Direct Payment Policy [External Link].

Contact can provide you with more information and advice. To learn more, visit Contact's Personal Budgets and Direct Payments page [External Link].

Encompass LATC has information and advice on Direct Payments. To find out more, visit Encompass' Direct Payments page [External Link].

Read the Personal Budgets Policy here [External Link]