Stage 1: Exploration and Design

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Exploration and Design supports are a great way to explore how you can combine paid NDIS supports we fund with the support you get from friends, family or others. If this sounds like you, then Exploration and Design supports are more likely to suit you.

We don’t fund things in your individualised living option that your friends and family are reasonably expected to provide for you.

Learn more about what’s reasonable to expect your friends, family or the community to provide.

To decide how many hours you need, we’ll look at:

how much you already know about what support you’ll need
what support you can get from informal supports like family and friends
whether you already receive individualised living option support.

Before we add funding in your plan for either stage, we’ll make sure that all supports meet the NDIS funding criteria, both individually and as a package.

We’ll fund up to 100 hours to support you to design your individualised living option.

We’ll fund up to 30 hours to design your individualised living option if you:

already know what help you’ll need
want to move to a home not too far from where you live now
can make your own decisions, or you have other people who help you make decisions.

We’ll fund up to 50 hours to design your individualised living option if you:

aren’t sure what help you’ll need
want to move to a home in a different area, for example if you want to move to another town or suburb outside your local area
need some help coming to an agreed decision and there are other people involved in decision-making.

We’ll fund up to 100 hours to design your individualised living option if you:

need to work out what help you’ll need in many areas across your life
want to move to a home in a different type of area, for example if you want to move from a city to a smaller town
have a lot of people involved in decision making for you who might have different views.

We’ll let you know if we need more information to decide the right level of NDIS support for you.

These hours may be different if you live in a remote or very remote location. You can learn more about this in the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits.

The NDIS supports we fund must meet the NDIS funding criteria, both individually and as a total package of supports.

To work out what Stage 1: Exploration and Design supports meet the NDIS funding criteria, we think about the following questions.

We can only fund NDIS support to explore and design an individualised living option if it’s related to your disability support needs.

We’ll consider whether you:

need NDIS support to live independently because of your disability
need to explore and design an individualised living option because of your disability.

That is, the reason for exploring and designing an individualised living option must relate to your disability support needs.

We’ll look at the disability-specific barriers that prevent you from pursuing your home and living goals. We’ll consider how the support will address your disability support needs. You’ll also need a home and living goal in your plan that Exploration and Design supports will help you pursue.

For example, you might have a goal to move out of your parents’ home for the first time. We’ll look at all the ways you might be able to pursue that goal. Funding Exploration and Design supports could be one way.

There are some things to remember.

Setting more and bigger goals doesn’t mean we’ll fund more and bigger NDIS supports.
Setting a goal about a certain type or amount of NDIS support you might want doesn’t mean we have an obligation to fund that NDIS support or in that amount.

Learn more about setting goals .

We need to make sure the NDIS supports we fund for Exploration and Design are likely to work for you and do what they’re supposed to. We think about whether this NDIS support will successfully help you explore and design your individualised living option and whether it will benefit you.

Exploration and Design supports are more likely to be effective and beneficial for you if you meet the criteria in Is an individualised living option right for you?

This generally means:

you need help at home for at least 6 hours each day
you’re ready, with help from people who know you well if you need it, to explore your needs, what you’d like, and your options
your family or friends might be part of your supports.

Individualised living options works best for people who need at least 6 hours of support per day. If you need less or a lot more help each day, there are different NDIS supports we can include in your plan which will likely meet your needs better.

You may not be ready to think about where and how you’d like to live and what NDIS supports you need. If so, Exploration and Design supports might not work for you now. It’s probably better to think about this when you’re feeling ready and wanting to explore your options.

We need to make sure your support is legal and safe. We can’t fund Exploration and Design supports if they’re likely to cause harm to you or might be a risk to others. If there's a different option that may be safer for you, we’ll discuss this with you.

We’ll make sure the cost of Exploration and Design supports is reasonable for your situation. This means we think about the cost of your Exploration and Design supports, and how these will benefit you over time. Your Exploration and Design supports need to be value for money compared to other NDIS supports that would achieve the same outcome.

Informal supports like family or friends can play an important role in helping you design your individualised living option. But usually, exploring and designing an individualised living option isn’t something we’d expect family, friends or the community do on their own.

Exploring and designing your individualised living option can be a complex task. It’s a good idea to get someone like a service provider or support coordinator, who is familiar with individualised living options, to help you design your own.

The Exploration and Design stage needs to be an NDIS support for you, which means it’s a support that the NDIS laws say we can fund.

We can’t fund supports that are appropriately funded or provided by another service system.

If you’re under 18 and live in an out-of-home care arrangement, your guardians are responsible for making decisions about exploring and designing a home environment that suits your needs. We don’t fund supports that are provided by state and territory services for children, such as out-of-home care accommodation.