We need to know your goals so we know how we can help you.
Your goals are your own and tell us about the things you’d like to do. You can have as many or as few goals as you want.
Your goals can be big or small, short term or long term, simple or complex. They can be about anything you want to work towards.
You may express your goals broadly, or you may have specific goals. For example, one of your goals might be to ’live independently’, and another might be ‘to have an accessible bathroom’.
You can set any goals you like, even if they’re about things we won’t fund.
How can you tell us your goals and the information about you?
The first part of your plan has information about:
- your daily life and living situation
- your social, work and study life
- the people who support you
- your goals.
You, or your plan nominee or child representative, set your goals and tell us what information you want to include about your life. This is sometimes called the ‘participant’s statement of goals and aspirations’.
If you want, your family and friends who support you can also give us information about their life.
You can tell us about your goals at any time before we approve your plan. If you tell us about your goals in person or over the phone, we’ll write them down for you.
They are your goals, and we’ll write them down in your own words. We can’t change your goals or choose them for you. But we can help you choose what words to use if you want us to.
Learn more about setting your goals .
Will we always fund supports for your goals?
Your NDIS funding aims to provide you with the supports you need for your disability.
These supports may help you maximise your independence and pursue your goals. You can also get support through mainstream and community services, or informal supports you can get through family and friends.
The supports we fund should help you pursue your goals, but you don’t need a specific goal for every support in your plan. When we decide if a support will help you pursue your goals, we think about your whole situation.
We look at the barriers related to your disability that prevent you from pursuing your goals, and how the support will address your disability support needs.
There are some things to remember when setting goals:
- Setting more and bigger goals doesn’t mean we’ll fund more and bigger funded supports.
- Setting a goal doesn’t mean we have an obligation to fund supports that help you pursue that goal.
- Setting a goal about an explicit type or amount of support you might want doesn’t mean we have an obligation to fund that support or in that amount.
This is because helping you pursue your goals is only one of the NDIS funding criteria. A support must meet all of the NDIS funding criteria to be funded under the NDIS. So not all supports that help you pursue your goals will be reasonable and necessary supports we can fund in your plan.
For example, you might be ready to look for work and have a goal to find a job. Disability Employment Services help people a with disability look for jobs, so we usually might not be able to fund this support.
But we can help you connect with a Disability Employment Service, and consider what supports we could fund to help build your job skills. Learn more about work and study Supports.
Learn more about how we consider your goals when we decide what supports to include in your plan.