Direct payments and personal budgets: taking control of your child’s support

Picture the meeting. A room in a council building or a call on a screen, a plan open in front of everybody, and a list of provision that has been decided somewhere else by people you have mostly never met. You are there to be told what has been arranged. You nod, you take notes, and you go home with a document describing a version of your child’s week that somebody else designed.

That is the model most families assume is the only model. The council arranges the support, the family receives it, and the conversation is about whether there is enough of it rather than about who holds it.

It is not the only model.

One of the things that surprised me most when I first came across this, professionally and as a parent, was how many families have no idea they can take direct control of the money that funds their child’s support. Personal budgets and direct payments are a route to shaping that support around your child’s actual life instead of accepting an off the peg version of it. They are not right for everyone and they carry real responsibilities. But the fact that they exist at all is something every SEND parent deserves to be told.

What a personal budget actually is

A personal budget is, in essence, an identified amount of funding to meet some of the needs set out in an Education, Health and Care Plan. Rather than the local authority commissioning every element directly, the funding is made visible, and in some cases the family gets a degree of control over how it is used to meet those needs.

The key word in that paragraph is some.

A personal budget does not necessarily cover everything in the plan, and not all provision can be delivered this way. That limitation is worth understanding early, because families who go in expecting to redesign the whole plan tend to come away disappointed, and the disappointment can put them off a mechanism that would still have helped with the part it does cover.

Where it does apply, though, the shift is meaningful. You move from being the person who receives the arrangement to being one of the people making it. In a system that spends a great deal of its time deciding things about your child without you in the room, that is not a small change.

Direct payments, or holding the money yourself

A direct payment is one way a personal budget can be delivered. The money comes to you, and you arrange and pay for the agreed support yourself. Instead of the council employing a support worker, for example, the funding might come to you so that you can arrange that support in the way that actually works for your child and your household.

This matters because of something obvious that the system is structurally bad at using. You know your child. You know what works and what does not, which people they respond to and which they freeze around, what time of day is realistic and what time of day is a waste of everybody’s afternoon. You know that the third Thursday of the month is a bad idea and you know precisely why.

A commissioned service cannot hold that level of detail about one family. It is not designed to. Direct payments let you translate what you know into the actual shape of the support, rather than hoping that a service specified in the abstract happens to land well in practice.

Quite often it is the small adjustments that make the difference. Not more hours. Different hours.

The responsibilities that come with control

I would be doing you no favours if I made this sound purely liberating.

Control brings responsibility. If you use a direct payment to employ somebody, you take on the duties that come with being, in effect, an employer. There is record keeping. There are rules about what the money can and cannot be spent on. The funding has to be accounted for, and the accounting is not optional just because your week has been difficult.

For some families that administrative load is a fair trade for the flexibility, and they manage it perfectly well, sometimes with support available to help them do it. For others it is one more thing on a pile that is already too high, and the commissioned route is genuinely the better fit. Neither answer is the wrong one.

The point is that it is a choice, and you should be making it knowingly rather than by default.

I would add one caution from experience. Do not take on a direct payment in a week when you are already at capacity, on the basis that you will get organised later. The setting up is the easy part. It is month seven, when a support worker is off sick and the paperwork is behind and nobody has counted the hours since the spring, that decides how this goes.

Where the financial planning lens helps

This is where my two perspectives meet, and where I think advisers have something useful to add that is not usually offered.

Handling a direct payment means handling money with rules attached, with deadlines and accountability. That is, in miniature, a financial management task. Families who are organised about it, who keep clean records and understand where the boundaries sit, find it far less stressful than families who treat it loosely and then face questions months later that they cannot answer from memory. The difference between those two groups is rarely intelligence or diligence. It is usually whether somebody told them at the start that the records would matter.

It also sits inside the wider picture rather than off to one side. The support funded this way interacts with the benefits position, the household budget and the longer term plan for your child. Treating it as an isolated pot is how it ends up unmanaged. Treating it as part of the whole is how it ends up working.

And if there is one practical action to take from all of this, it is to ask. Ask whether a personal budget is available for elements of your child’s plan, and whether a direct payment would suit your family. The worst outcome is that the answer is no, or that you look at what is involved and decide the commissioned route suits you better, which is a perfectly good decision to have made deliberately.

Most families never ask, however, because nobody has ever told them there was a question there to ask.

So think about the last meeting you sat in, the one where the arrangements were read out to you. Did anyone mention this? And if they did not, what else has nobody mentioned?

Want to talk it through?

A short, no-obligation conversation by phone or video, about your own situation.

More articles

This article is general information drawn from professional and personal experience, not personal or legal advice. Personal budgets and direct payments come with specific rules that vary between areas, so check the detail with your local authority and take advice where you need it.

Legacy Capital Management is an Appointed Representative of and represents only St. James’s Place Wealth Management plc (which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority) for the purpose of advising solely on the Group’s wealth management products and services, more details of which are set out on the Group’s website at www.sjp.co.uk/products.

The ‘St. James’s Place Partnership’ and the titles ‘Partner’ and ‘Partner Practice’ are marketing terms used to describe St. James’s Place representatives.

Legacy Capital Management, Rosewood House, Duffield Park, Stoke Poges, SL2 4HY

SJP Approved 30/07/2026