Ever heard the saying ‘the only constant in life is change’? Well, when it comes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), it seems ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus might’ve been onto something!
From the roll-out of PACE and the renewed focus on eligibility reassessments, to the new definition of NDIS supports and the introduction of the Notice of Impairments, it’s certainly been a tumultuous couple of years for Australia’s disability community.
And now it seems there’s another change on the horizon – one that could significantly alter the NDIS landscape – and it’s coming in the shape of what’s known as a support needs assessment.
Put simply, a support needs assessment is a tool the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) is developing to help it understand the supports a person with disability needs.
The Agency will use the information it has on file – like details about the impairment or impairments that make you eligible for the Scheme – and information it gathers during a support needs assessment to decide how much funding you need and what your NDIS budget will look like.
Support needs assessments don’t exist yet, but it’s thought they could be introduced by the NDIA as soon as late 2025.
At the end of 2023, the final report of the NDIS Review was published. The report – ‘Working together to deliver the NDIS’ – included 26 recommendations and 139 actions designed to ‘provide a blueprint to renew the promise of the NDIS and deliver a more accessible and inclusive Australia’.
The Independent Review Panel said that while people with disability may need to complete a functional capacity assessment as part of their application to join the Scheme, once they’d been accepted, a support needs assessment was the recommended tool for understanding the supports needed for daily life and achieving goals.
The panel recommended skilled needs assessors (allied health professionals, people with lived experience, and people with substantial disability sector experience) be engaged to:
“NDIS processes should be fair and clear and easier for people with disability and their families to understand,” said the panel. “You should know and understand how decisions about access and budgets are made.”
“NDIS budgets should be set in a fair and transparent way. You should be given a flexible budget and trusted to use it in a way that helps you achieve your goals and live an inclusive life.”
You can find out more about the NDIS Review and its recommendations here.
In early 2025, in response to the NDIS Review recommendation, the NDIA announced it was ‘working to design and test a new way of gathering information about the support people with disability need and to set their NDIS budgets’.
At the same time, it released a Request for Tender for support needs assessment tools for adults (people aged 16 years and older) and Requests for Information (an industry consultation process) to work out how the Agency can best understand support needs for children and specific kinds of support funded by the NDIS.
You can read more about the tender and requests for information in this article by the NDIS experts at DSC.
Further information about the outcome of the tender and consultation processes, as well as the next steps in the NDIA’s plans, is yet to be released.
At the moment, when the NDIA makes a decision about your funding it relies on information already in its system, as well as any new information you provide.
In practice, that usually means you spend a lot of time gathering everything from functional capacity assessments and provider reports, through to medical reports and lived experience and carer impact statements – all of which only tell part of your story.
Not only is the endless collection of reports and assessments incredibly time-consuming and costly, but all that documentation mostly speaks to the things you can’t do or are limited in doing because of your disability, rather than the supports you need to help you achieve the things you want to achieve.
Another issue with the current system is that not all participants have the capacity or means to provide robust documentation, and that means they run the risk of receiving inadequate funding or having funding allocated to the wrong budget categories.
That’s why the NDIS Review recommended a new, consistent approach – one that will hopefully mean better and fairer allocation of funding for every participant – and it looks like support needs assessments will come into play to inform the ‘new framework plans’ the NDIA is going to introduce.
The Agency has said it will start using support needs assessments from September 2025, and it will take up to five years to transition all NDIS participants onto new-look plans, which will include stated supports (like assistive technology) and flexible budgets.
However, Every Australian Counts – a grassroots campaign for the disability community – has called for more time for co-design of support needs assessments.
“The new support needs assessments are a critical part of the NDIS and must be well-designed and must work for participants,” the Every Australian Counts campaign statement says.
“If the support needs assessments are designed collaboratively, tested so we can be sure they work, and delivered by trusted health professionals, they have the potential to bring fairness and equity to NDIS decision-making.
“They have the potential to restore trust in the system and improve the lives of people with disabilities across Australia.”
It seems the NDIS shapeshifting is set to continue for a while yet.
