Submission to the New Framework Planning and NDIS Supports Consultation

Submission to the New Framework Planning and NDIS Supports Consultation

Lodged date: 24 August 2026

Receiving body: NDIS Legislation, Policy and Engagement Branch, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing

Consultation: New Framework Planning and NDIS Supports Consultation

Dear Department,

I write as President of NableU Community Systems Incorporated to provide our organisation's first formal submission concerning the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the rights, agency and practical experience of people with disability.

NableU welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the development of the New Framework Planning Rules and the proposed amendments to the NDIS Supports Transitional Rules.

We have a direct and substantial interest in this work.

NableU is concerned with the systems surrounding disability: how participants understand and exercise their rights, how they find and coordinate supports, how information moves between participants and the people assisting them, and how administrative systems either enable or obstruct genuine choice and control.

Our interest is therefore not limited to whether a particular NDIS policy appears reasonable when described abstractly.

We are interested in whether the system remains reasonable when it encounters an actual human being.

That distinction is particularly important in the design of new framework planning.

The proposed framework creates a chain in which a participant's support needs are assessed, those observations are translated into assessed categories of support, those categories influence a budget calculation, and that calculated budget determines the resources available to the participant over a potentially lengthy plan period.

The quality of every decision downstream therefore depends upon the quality of the assessment upstream.

A funding methodology can be internally consistent, reproducible and administratively efficient while still producing systematically incorrect outcomes if the assessment from which it begins does not adequately represent the participant's real life.

Our principal concern at this stage is therefore the proposed model of support needs assessment.

Disability must be assessed across life, not merely during an appointment

A single assessment window is not sufficient to reliably determine the support requirements of many people with disability.

Functional capacity is not necessarily fixed.

It can vary significantly according to:

• environment;
• sensory load;
• social demand;
• fatigue;
• pain;
• sleep;
• emotional regulation;
• cognitive load;
• executive functioning demands;
• unfamiliarity;
• transitions;
• interpersonal circumstances;
• accumulated stress; and
• the availability or absence of existing supports.

A participant may appear highly capable during a scheduled assessment conducted in a quiet, structured and predictable environment, yet require substantially greater assistance to undertake ordinary activities in their home or community.

The reverse can also occur.

A participant may be assessed during an unusually difficult period and present with support requirements greater than their ordinary baseline.

Neither a particularly good day nor a particularly bad day should automatically become the model of the person's disability.

The assessment system therefore needs to identify a participant's range of functional capacity and support need across time and environments.

We recommend a multi-source, longitudinal assessment pathway

The standard structured assessment should remain one source of evidence.

It should not be the only source.

Participants should also have access to an optional ecological and longitudinal assessment pathway where this is necessary to properly understand their disability.

This could include a small number of structured observations or reports collected over an appropriate period and across relevant environments.

Depending upon the participant and their circumstances, information could be contributed by:

• the participant themselves;
• a parent;
• guardian or nominee;
• family member or other informal support;
• regular disability support worker;
• support coordinator;
• allied health professional; or
• another person who regularly observes the participant's functioning and support requirements.

With the participant's consent, assessment could also include observation within the home or community where this would provide information that cannot reasonably be obtained in an office-based or interview-style assessment.

The purpose would not be continuous monitoring.

Nor should home observation become mandatory.

The purpose is sampling.

A handful of appropriately selected observations across different days, levels of demand and environments can provide a much more representative picture of disability than a single interaction.

For example, an assessor may need to understand the difference between a participant:

• speaking competently during a structured one-to-one interview;
• organising themselves at home without external prompting;
• completing several tasks sequentially;
• travelling into the community;
• managing an unexpected change;
• communicating while overloaded;
• recovering after sustained social or cognitive demand; and
• functioning following several difficult days rather than one relatively stable day.

These are not necessarily equivalent measures of capacity.

Assess support need as a distribution, not a single number

The assessment should attempt to establish at least:

• the participant's usual support requirements;
• periods of relatively low support need;
• periods of high support need;
• how frequently those periods occur;
• their likely duration;
• environmental or situational factors associated with them;
• what additional support becomes necessary;
• what happens when that support is unavailable; and
• whether timely support prevents a significantly greater support requirement later.

This is particularly important where disability affects executive functioning, communication, sensory processing, emotional regulation, cognition, fatigue, pain, mental health or behaviour.

In such cases there may be no meaningful single value representing "how much support this person needs".

There is instead a range of support requirements occurring with different probabilities under different conditions.

A robust needs assessment should be capable of representing that reality.

The assessment must account for masking and temporary performance

The Rules and assessor guidance should also expressly distinguish between performing a task once and being able to perform that task reliably and sustainably.

Some participants can temporarily marshal considerable cognitive, emotional or physical resources during an assessment.

They may mask impairment, use compensatory strategies, defer distress until after the assessment, or perform unusually well because the assessment environment temporarily removes many of the demands encountered in ordinary life.

An assessor observing that performance may reasonably conclude that the participant can perform the activity.

That does not establish that the participant can perform it:

reliably, repeatedly, safely, independently and sustainably across ordinary environments.

That should be the relevant test of functional capacity.

The assessment should also consider the cost of performance.

If a participant can complete an activity independently but doing so consumes sufficient cognitive, physical or emotional resources that subsequent activities become impossible, the first activity cannot sensibly be treated as having occurred without functional consequence.

Flexible budgets should respond to variable need

The proposed framework's emphasis on flexible funding creates an opportunity to deal with variable support needs well.

Where a participant's needs fluctuate, an average may be useful for determining an overall funding envelope.

It should not become a daily or weekly entitlement ceiling.

If a participant averages a particular amount of assistance across a period, there is no reason to expect that assistance to be consumed evenly.

A participant may appropriately require very little paid support during one period and substantially greater support during another.

The system should therefore distinguish between:

averaging for the purpose of calculating sufficient total funding , and

requiring support consumption to conform to that average.

Participants should be able to conserve flexible funding during lower-need periods and deploy considerably more of it during higher-need periods.

This is not misuse of flexible funding.

It is precisely what flexibility should mean when disability itself is variable.

Third-party evidence must complement, not override, the participant

A more ecological assessment model also requires safeguards.

Observation in a participant's home or community must be voluntary and proportionate.

Participants should determine who may contribute collateral evidence wherever practicable.

They should have the opportunity to:

• see material relied upon;
• correct factual inaccuracies;
• explain observations in context;
• identify disagreements between different sources of evidence; and
• understand how that evidence has affected the assessment outcome.

Parents, guardians, workers and clinicians may provide extremely valuable information, particularly where they observe circumstances the assessor cannot.

Their evidence should add dimensionality to the participant's account, not replace the participant's voice.

Why this matters to NableU

NableU's interest in this consultation arises from the practical consequences of system design.

NDIS participants do not experience legislation as legislation.

They experience it through assessments, interfaces, planners, providers, invoices, support workers, decisions, reviews, misunderstandings, unavailable services and the daily question of whether the support they require can actually be obtained.

Small assumptions embedded in administrative systems can therefore produce very large effects.

If a participant's real-world variability is compressed into an unrepresentative assessment result, that error can propagate through every subsequent stage of new framework planning.

An assessment error becomes a categorisation error.

A categorisation error becomes a budget error.

A budget error sustained across a long plan can become years of unmet disability support need.

This makes the design of the support needs assessment much more than an administrative question.

It is an issue of equity, participant agency and the practical ability of the NDIS to respond to disability as it actually exists.

Standardisation is valuable where it reduces arbitrary decision-making and unequal treatment.

It becomes harmful where consistency is achieved by removing information necessary to understand an individual participant.

The objective should therefore be consistent methodology without artificial uniformity of human experience.

Our recommendations

NableU Community Systems Incorporated recommends that the New Framework Planning Rules and associated operational guidance:

1. expressly recognise that functional capacity and support needs may vary substantially across time and environments;
2. prohibit reliance on a single assessment interaction as determinative where there is credible evidence of material variability;
3. provide an optional longitudinal and ecological assessment pathway;
4. permit structured evidence and observations from home and community environments where appropriate;
5. enable participants to nominate parents, guardians, nominees, workers, clinicians and other relevant people to contribute evidence;
6. require assessors to distinguish between observed performance and reliable, repeatable and sustainable functional capacity;
7. require consideration of masking, compensatory strategies and the functional cost of performing activities;
8. assess the frequency, severity and duration of higher-support periods rather than relying solely upon an average presentation;
9. ensure budget calculations provide sufficient resources for reasonably foreseeable high-support periods;
10. expressly preserve participants' ability to vary expenditure from flexible budgets according to their actual support requirements over time;
11. ensure collateral evidence supplements rather than overrides participant evidence and agency; and
12. provide participants with transparent access to the evidence, assessment outputs and reasoning used to determine their support categories and subsequent budget.

Continuing engagement

This is NableU Community Systems Incorporated's first formal submission on NDIS policy.

It will not be our last.

We believe participant-led organisations have an important role in the continuing development of the Scheme because participants encounter aspects of system behaviour that may not be visible from policy, administrative or provider perspectives alone.

We are particularly interested in the interaction between disability, system design, assessment methodology, participant agency, accessibility, administrative burden and the practical operation of supports in everyday life.

We would welcome continued engagement with the Department and the NDIA as the support needs assessment methodology, budget method and exposure drafts of the New Framework Planning Rules are developed.

The success of new framework planning should ultimately be measured not by whether it creates a cleaner administrative model, but by whether it produces a more accurate understanding of individual disability support needs and gives participants sufficient agency and resources to live their lives.

Yours sincerely,

Nathan Organ President NableU Community Systems Incorporated

https://NableU.org