The Support Planning Standard Has Made Person-Centred Planning a Lost Art

Once upon a time, person-centred NDIS planning was a craft. People did courses in it.

There were facilitators who could sit in a room with someone, their family, and a butcher’s-paper pad, and three hours later you’d have something alive — dreams, fears, who matters, what a good day looks like, what the person would walk over hot coals to avoid.

Then we got a NDIS Practice Standard for support planning, and — bless us — we did what we always do. We turned a craft into a template.

To be fair, the standard itself is fine. It asks, quite reasonably, that the participant be actively involved in developing their plan, that the plan reflect their needs and goals, that it be reviewed. Lovely. The problem isn’t the words on the page. The problem is what “actively involved” has quietly come to mean in practice.

In too many orgs, “actively involved” now translates to: we emailed them the draft. Or worse — we read it to them and they nodded.

We’ve confused presence with participation and signature with consent. The plan gets written, the box gets ticked, the audit gets passed, and somewhere in all that compliance the actual person fell out of the person-centred plan.

You can spot a template plan from across a room. The goals all sound the same. “Participant will increase independence in the community.” Whose words are those? Not the participant’s, I promise you. Nobody has ever said over a cuppa, “you know what I really want? To increase my independence in the community.” They want to catch the train to the footy without their support worker hovering. They want to make a curry. They want to text a friend and not have someone read it first.

That’s the stuff that got lost. Not because the standard is bad, but because we let the form do the thinking.

And, instead of “one person one plan” we have a “schedule of supports”, “several assessments” and a variety of “support plans” that read more like dating profiles including the wish list of activities.

Here’s my challenge: before you open the template next time, have the conversation without it.

Pen down.

Ask what a good day looks like.

Shut up and listen for longer than is comfortable.

Make it collaborative.

Google ‘circles of support’ and ‘PATH’.

Then go fill in the boxes.

The standard is the floor, not the ceiling. Person-centred NDIS planning isn’t a document. It’s a discipline.

Let’s get it back.

I could talk butcher’s paper and good questions all day — and there’s a way to do it that still sails through audit.

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