Before you start get comfy, remember to stay hydrated and take a break if needed. This one is a long one.
Whether you have been recently approved for funding or you have been a participant for a long time, planning, creating and wording your goals can sometimes be challenging. Some questions may include what will NDIA approve? What kinds of activities can my goals include? How do I create goals that are flexible enough to allow me freedom to explore that also have tangible outcomes and benefits that NDIA can use to benchmark the success of what I am doing and the benefits it provides me?
Goals in an NDIS plan are supposed to be specific, measurable and have objectives that show what the participant aims to achieve with support. Goals are a statement of what your intentions are with NDIS funding and they are the key to getting the right funding. Goals are meant to help you improve your quality of life and promote independence. They are meant to focus on your strengths, talents and future potential.
The fact is that, while they can do that for some, for others it is more about maintaining quality of life rather than improving. And for a few, it is more about softening the decline over time because there are circumstances where decline is inevitable, and quality of life should be the focus. NDIS goal setting does not always align with exactly what is needed and are certainly not one size fits all. Even for participants who can significantly improve their circumstances, planners don’t always get it right and sometimes base their decisions on personal biases. So how do participants make the best of it? How to we increase our chances of goals and funding being approved?
Coming up with the “right” goals can seem overwhelming and quite a few times people leave LAC’s or others to come up with goals on their behalf. But no one knows you, your disability or the impacts it has on your life as well as you ever will. So, let’s look at empowering each and every one of you with skills to start practicing and making your own goals for future plans. We should start by remembering you each have your own strengths, challenges and dreams. You will find you are probably going to be adapting some generic information to better suit your needs. Goals should focus on what you hope to achieve. How NDIS supports you to get there comes after.
How many goals should I have?
There are actually no rules here (this is one of my favourite things about goals, work on it until you have what you want). You could have 1 or 50, you need a minimum of 1 to establish an approved plan. Generally, it is recommended that you have a couple of short term goals for easy progress reference, and a couple of long term goals to work towards over the life of your plan. However many goals you have, each one should be a clear statement of what you want to achieve so the NDIS has a well-defined understanding of what motivates you and what your priorities are. Each one should also clearly outline what kind of support you will need to reach it.
Who can I go to for advice about my goals?
Your LAC should be your first stop, but they aren’t the only ones who may have insights. Your informal supports (friends, family) may be able to give you ideas that they think might benefit you. Your coordinators and providers may also be able to make suggestions based on other goals they have seen. You can also google NDIS goals and go on a bit of an adventure looking for ideas, they will just need to be re-tailored to best represent you.
What should I think about before setting goals?
Your goals are about you so always start with the answers to these questions:
- What matters to you most right now?
- What is working well in your life and what support do you need to keep that going?
- What are you struggling with and what obstacles are holding you back?
- Do you need help with work or school?
- Do you have enough opportunities to join in community activities?
- Are there any skill you need to learn that would improve your circumstances?
- What do you want your future to look like?
Once you have answers to these questions, you can start breaking them down into small steps that can then become your goals. Make sure that each of the steps has a tangible outcome that you can achieve.
What if I set goals and they are wrong and I need to change them?
The great thing about goals is that they are forever changing and evolving over time as your needs change over time. Goals should be regularly reviewed and adjusted to make sure they stay relevant and useful on your journey. If they need to change, you change them. It can take a lot of the stress out of choosing goals when you think about them as being temporary anyway. Goals play a crucial role, but they aren’t set in stone.
What categories can I use to help make setting goals easier?
There are several headings you can try to put goals under to help you in working out what would benefit you most. These are more of a brain guide to get you thinking about all areas of your life and what is working and what isn’t. If you think about each heading and try to list things under each it will make you less likely to overlook or forget things you wanted to add:
- Communication and social interaction
- Education and learning
- Employment and vocational skills
- Sensory regulation
- Daily living skills
- Social inclusion and community participation
- Behaviour and emotional regulation
- Independence in the community
Early intervention goals, especially for children, has its own subheadings. This is because there are a lot of areas that are considered to be parental responsibility or school responsibility. They should have achievable goals under the following headings though-
- Enhancing school readiness
- Developing social skills
- Improving communication
What questions can I ask to refine my goals?
Once you have your goals in mind you should be asking yourself 3 main questions –
- How do I see myself working towards them?
- When would I like to start working towards them?
- What kind of support would help me reach them?
Sometimes the answers to these questions will be straightforward. For example, if your goal is to complete a certificate, attending classes, completing work, starting when the course begins and getting a support worker to assist with travel/ transport. Sometimes the answer may not be as straight forward. For example, improving mobility to be able to go on nature walks and explore. Would you want to start outdoors or in a gym? Is there a season you want to start, or a trail you want to walk or a walking group you want to join? What kind of support worker or allied health professional do you think would benefit you or are there other kinds of support through AT that you will need? Some goals are going to need more thought to be refined down to a clear statement that NDIS can understand and fund. But if you use those 3 questions as a guide to structure your goal it will narrow it down for you.
When refining the goals you also want to look at the wording to make sure they are not too limiting and not too vague (lets not make this confusing and difficult right?). For example, you might have the goal to complete a certificate 4 in business management. That is a very limiting goal. What if you start the course and realise it is not for you, or you finish it and realise you need further study? A better wording would be more broad and longer term, I would change it to wanting to achieve a level of education that creates more career opportunities. This allows for different courses, ongoing study, training and a wide range of other options. You don’t want it too vague, but you do want it to able to continue to line up with your needs and values. Saying I want to increase career opportunities would be too vague for the NDIA to accept for a lot of people. You want a route there but not a restricted one, focus more on the outcomes than the pathways and make sure NDIA knows how you intend to go about it.
How can I tell if my goals are long term or short term?
Both types of goals are important in helping you achieve your outcomes that you want through the NDIS. There are some key differences.
Short term goals are focused on what you can achieve now to support your progress to long term goals like signing up for a course or purchasing AT for the kitchen to make it easier to learn to cook. These are typically goals you expect to complete in the next 6 -12 months. These tend to get a lot more specific.
Long term goals focus on how you want your end target to look like. These can take several years to achieve and often rely on meeting several short-term goals along the way. These are also more likely to involve the development of independence. These goals might be attaining employment in a certain industry or cooking your own food independently. These are broader umbrella goals that can help form your short-term goals. If you can break it down into a lot of steps it is probably long term.
I have my goals, how do I get them funded?
This is the main question on everyone’s lips, especially now. You can put a whole lot of work into creating your goals and then find that they are rejected when it comes time to talk about funding. Anything you can do to increase your chances is going to be a bonus. It is important to make sure all of your goals are clear, realistic and fit in with NDIS guidelines. Using the language we spoke about in Talk the talk - effectively communicating with the NDIA when it comes to your funding will go a long way towards fitting in with those guidelines. Making sure they are in line with the disability you are funded for is important. Below are some other things you can do to increase your chances.
- Make sure the goals are specific and complete (I will do a little on the structure of a good goal at the end)
- Make sure you provide as much evidence of your needs as possible. This includes assessments, medical reports, recommendations and impact statements.
- Get familiar with your NDIS budget categories because the first thing an NDIS planner will look at is how your goals are going to fit into your budget. Your goals should line up.
- Make sure you are familiar with your goals, especially if you didn’t write them yourself because you need to be ready to discuss them in a planning meeting in detail. A planner will want to know how this will help you. A planner is going to want to know how this relates to the disability you are funded for. A planner is going to either read your goals that you have submitted or listen to them and record them as you tell them. Sometimes planners will suggest rewording of your goals. They must seek your consent to make these changes before including them in your plan so check the changes carefully. You do not need them trying to overly restrict you or change the intention of the goal.
- If in doubt get help from your coordinator or LAC or a good mentor.
Are children’s goals looked at differently to adult goals?
Absolutely. There is a lot of push from NDIA to make the goals and needs of children the responsibility of parents, the health system and the education department. Unfortunately sometimes these services are not up to par and cannot provide the support and early intervention needed. To make it harder, each child is very different, each delayed or exceeding in different areas, each developing at different rates, development is not linear. Their goals can change rapidly, especially when still in the period of being diagnosed.
It can also be hard to engage your child in the decision-making process for their goals depending on their age and disability. The goals should be structured the same as adult goals with the intended outcome, evidence that it is needed and what you need to support them. But the goals that will be accepted will be much more restricted. I tend to advise parents to set umbrella goals with children. Umbrella goals are specific goals, just with a lot of different ways that might be achieved leaving room for interpretation.
For example, very few children get funding for community access because NDIA says children of a young age wouldn’t be accessing the community without their parents under normal circumstances, so they won’t fund it for a disability. We have seen community access approved through allied health practitioners though, when the plan has stated that the child has no impulse control, and it is a barrier for them to be in the community without supervision. The goal is to develop social and road skills for the child’s safety. This allowed funding for an OT to take the child out to community access to build those skills. There are other ways it could be done but this is still in line with their plan. Another example is for a child in a wheelchair, the goal is to build the physical strength for the child to be able to move the wheelchair on their own. Again, there are many ways this could be achieved but they decided to opt for a physiotherapist to take the child out into the community to build those skills. One example of a long-term goal, your goal may be having your child develop the skills to be able to stay home alone without a carer as a teenager or attend high school independently. There are so many ways this could be interpreted and accomplished. You could use any number of professionals, therapies and assistive technology options to try to achieve this.
Keeping to umbrella goals for children, for the time being, seems to be the most effective to get more goals approved with an open ended request for a worker or allied health professional to assist in achieving this goal. Also remember that therapy is not a goal, therapy is the tool you want to use to reach the goal. If your goal is just to do a certain therapy, it removes the flexibility to use the allied health professionals’ full range of skills to support you or your child. Even slight wording changes can be limiting. If you say I want my child to improve their communication skills, you may be restricted to only using a set number of therapies from a speech pathologist. If you say I want my child to improve their comprehension, you will get more freedom to choose between a speech pathologist or and occupational therapist or even be able to use funding for both for a range of therapies.
What do I do if I did everything I could and it still got rejected?
Consider other funding options. If they reject a support worker helping see if they will approve allied health support. If they say it isn’t NDIS, see if there are other government agencies that fund it, the planner should be able to give you suggestions. Ultimately, you can always rewrite your goals and try again or take it to a review. There are a lot of cases where things start as a no that become a yes with the right planner and wording. Not everything will get across the line but getting what should be funded across is important. Some things definitely are not NDIS supports, so if it is on the no list you may need to go back and asses what you need from the NDIS.
How to structure a goal
Something incredibly fun about this whole adventure that I have been on for the last few months with the legislation changes, is learning that there are no set rules about what goals should look like. Everyone is supposed to just write whatever they want and hope a planner sees it as reasonable, necessary, supported by evidence and disability specific. I remotely understood this before the changes, but now that a lot of peoples plans are suddenly being dragged into question, it is strikingly obvious. If you google “structure of an NDIS goal” you get a whole lot of pages going “here are goals, here is why they are super important, great now that you have them go submit them, good luck!”. I don’t even need goals that align with NDIS in my personal life and I still found this incredibly frustrating when trying to help others. So I am going to apologise to everyone here who has ever tried to google how to structure an NDIS goal just because I can imagine how quickly that became confusing and infuriating. Some of the infographics alone trying to show how “flawless and smooth” the process is just made my blood boil. But now I am ranting.
Now I am going to try and give you a summary of how to best create your goals based on my experiences working with others and how their thought processes worked. Fun fact is that you are all going to go about creating your goals differently because you are unique and disabilities are unique. Something you find easy, someone else will find hard and vice versa. Age will also affect how each of you is viewing your goals. Younger people tend to have more long term ideas and struggle with short term, much older people can see short term very easy but struggle with long term (this is a generalisation based on goals in many plans I have seen so please don’t jump on me, everyone is very unique and there are people who don’t fit the trends). I am going to choose the example of school and work to give everyone an idea of how the process should work.
First step: create goals
For people who are able to think of short-term goals but not long-term:
Put your short-term goals together on a piece of paper. Imagine it is wanting to learn to take public transport, wanting help deciding on a course to do and wanting assistance with developing skills to manage your anxiety. To develop your long-term goals look at the reasons you are choosing those short term goals. What are you hoping the outcome will be? What future are you aiming for? Ultimately in this example it looks like the aim is to find a career path that will be accessible to you and you will be able to successfully fulfil independently. So this makes your long term goal to engage in activities that will help me create a career path and improve my employment opportunities.
Then you would look at your strengths and weaknesses. Are there more steps besides your first three that you will need to take to reach your long-term goals such as purchasing assistive technology or improving your coherence in workplace settings. Suddenly your 3 short term goals has increased to 5 or 6 goals on varying timelines. Try to group all of your short-term goals to see if there is a coherent long-term goal that can be created.
For people who are able to think of long-term goals but not short term:
Say you have the long-term goal of having assistance to find and engage in a suitable career path. That is pretty vague and you yourself might not know what that would look like. You need to try to break that down into smaller steps to get to that point. If you are completely unsure of what you want I would suggest that your first step be having support to explore activities that align with my interest to find potential career paths that support my passions, my strengths and my disability. This can then be broken down into support to build confidence to engage in communication and community activities, assistance with improving mobility or learning to use public transport to be able to engage in more community opportunities and learning activities, support finding and attending volunteer programs and support with creating resumes and job applications.
Now your one big goal has generated 6 goals that all work together.
Regardless of which way you work, you are using the goals you have to try to create a group of goals that will work together, and you can make as many groups as you want. You might want to learn to cook independently and buy assistive technology to help you short-term so that long-term you can live on your own. You might want to access a physiotherapist in the short-term and have the bigger goal of reducing the impact of your declining disability on your mobility. Each of these examples will have multiple other options and steps that can also be incorporated into your goals. And it is important to make sure those goals meet all of your needs.
Next step - timelines
Now for your short term goals, set a deadline. So for one of the above examples it turns into “in the next 6 months I need support to explore activities that align with my interest to find potential career paths that support my passions, my strengths and my disability”. If you are getting AT, you can state something like “Engage with a physiotherapist to assess my needs and options for assistive technology to help with my mobility/occupational therapist to assist with my organisational skills”.
For medium and long-term goals, we don’t tend to set a deadline, they are done when every other step is and you reach your goal. As more goals are reached, your medium and long term goals should eventually move close enough to become short term goals with a timeline.
Next step: What’s stopping you
Here is where you add the current obstacles to reaching your short term goals and what is required to assist you overcoming them. So for “in the next 6 months I need support to explore activities that align with my interest to find potential career paths that support my passions, my strengths and my disability” your current challenges may include anxiety meeting new people, inability to use public transport and needing assistance accessing certain locations. What might be required to attend these activities may include a psychologist or occupational therapist to assist with the anxiety ongoing and a support worker to assist with transport and mobility when out in the community.
Long-term goals may not necessarily have current challenges that you are facing but still have needed supports. For something like “assistance to find and engage in a suitable career path” there may be current obstacles that your short-term goals are trying to address, but long term you may want to add in here support to develop and practice a daily routine with an occupational therapist that will eventually make transitioning into the workplace easier. Don’t lock yourself into anything too specific about what that means because it could mean anything. It could me learning to meditate each day to relieve stress, it could mean learning to set alarms to manage time blindness, it could mean getting into a good sleep rhythm to work night shift. It is specific enough that NDIA can see what you are intending to do with your funding without being too locked into any one option.
Finally: Language
Here we want to dial in the language that we spoke about. Using strong language (replace I want with I need don’t use words like maybe or might) that is direct and makes you sound like you are absolutely sure this needs to be in your plan. What you end up with when you present your goals to a planner will look something like this:
My Goals:
I need assistance to find and engage in a suitable career path to increase my options to engage in economic participation. I need support to develop my daily living skills and practice daily routines with an occupational therapist that will eventually make transitioning into the workplace easier.
In the next 6 months I need support to explore activities that align with my interest to find potential career paths that support my strengths and my disability. Currently I struggle with my anxiety meeting new people, I am unable to use public transport unassisted and need assistance accessing certain locations. I require an occupational therapist to assist with the anxiety ongoing and a support worker to assist with transport and mobility when out in the community to increase my ability to have choice and control over my future career options.
In the next 12 months I need to engage with a physiotherapist to assess my needs and options for assistive technology to help with my mobility out in the community. I currently find I have difficulty with walking long distances and on uneven surfaces and it is limiting my social and community participation.
I need support building my capacity to engage in communication and community activities. Having a support worker to assist me in the community while I develop my skills and coping strategies, will allow me to continue to reach my goals while working with a therapist ongoing will reduce my long-term reliance on supports.
In the next 12 months I need assistance with increasing my independence to navigate public transport to be able to engage in more community opportunities and learning activities. I am currently unable to read timetables or use public transport apps, and I have difficulty in crowded places. Having either a support worker or an occupational therapist assist me with developing these skills will improve my career opportunities in future.
I need support finding and attending volunteer programs and exploring vocational interests to identify potential career paths. I need assistance to discover the type of work best suited to my strengths and volunteering and attending short courses with the aid of a support worker will help me learn my best attributes in workplace settings.
I need assistance in improving my coherence of instructions in workplace settings. Due to the nature of my disability, I find it difficult to manage a large number of instructions and navigate stressful situations. I need support to develop strategies that I can use to improve my understanding and improve my sense of wellbeing in a workplace.
Goals complete!
Now if you happen to have more groups of goals and you put them through the same process, You will end up with a very robust set of goals to present to a planner. Some may not be approved, some may end up slightly altered, but if you get most of them it will make a significant difference. It is important that every support you ask for is well linked to your disability and well documented and supported by evidence. Anything you can’t provide evidence for, runs the risk of being rejected.
Hopefully you survived to the end. If you have any questions, as always, feel free to ask.
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. Thanks as always Lauren.