What is a Personal Budget?
What is a Personal Budget?
Personal Budgets come from public services including councils and the NHS. A Personal Budget is:
- Money for children and young people who need extra help above what they get through universal and targeted services.
- An amount of money to support the extra needs of the child/young person. If the family choose to receive and organise the funding of a Personal Budget; this is a Direct Payment.
- Not the only money available to support a child or young person.
Click here to view our Microsoft Sway on Personal Budgets.
The following Personal Budgets are available in Newcastle to eligible children and how they qualify. In general, this means that:
- Personal Education Budget (they need 1 and 2 below)
- Children who have an Education Health and Care plan (EHC Plan).
- Extra funding from the high needs funding budget.
Because of their complex educational needs.
- Social Care Personal Budget or Individual Budget (they need 1 and 2 below)
- Have a social worker.
- Have complex needs and who need extra funding to be “Safe, Equal and Achieving”.
- Personal Health Budget
- Meet the criteria for the NHS children’s continuing care funding.
- More information on this page NHS continuing healthcare.
- Personal Travel Budget is for children who need home to school transport.
What are the benefits to families and available choices?
It is a priority that parents and young people are able to discuss using a Personal Budget so that it will work for them and meets the agreed outcomes.
How a young person can use a personal budget depends on what kind of budget it is, for example: it would be odd to use a Personal Health Budget to get a teaching assistant to support them in school.
People have used a range of personal budgets to provide:
- Support in the home, whether it’s equipment or help with personal and domestic activities
- Equipment to help communication or learning
- Support for the child to join in with local clubs or activities
- Sports or cultural activities
- Short breaks
- Employing personal assistants
- Someone to go with you on a daytrip or short break e.g. so you have more time for brothers and sisters
- Work experience or a work-based learning opportunity
How are Personal Budgets provided?
Providers have different ways of organising Personal Budgets. They all work through the Education and Health Care (EHC) Plan to ensure the family know how much Personal Budget they will get.
This worked out through the assessment part of the EHC Plan.
What information do parents and young people need about personal budgets?
The information families, children and young people need about personal budgets are:
- The opportunity, rights and responsibilities of personal budgets (background).
- Eligibility.
- Funding included within a personal budget.
- How the offer is worked out.
- How it is agreed.
- The choices families have about how to manage the budget.
- How to work through disagreements here Mediation and disagreement resolution - Personal Social Care Budget
All these issues explained in detail in the Council’s Personal Budget policy.
Finding services to spend personal budgets on?
This website is here to list services you may find useful, and that you may want to consider. Please search the site, or see What is the Local Offer for more details.
Who can provide support to families?
Several organisations who can offer advice to families about Personal Budgets:
