Contribution
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this debate. I will focus my remarks on home-to-school transport for SEND children and young people, as I know others will talk about other aspects of the home-to-school transport system.
The home-to-school transport system for SEND children and young people is a good lens through which to view how parts of the SEND system in general do not really communicate with one another. There is currently a statutory duty to provide home-to-school transport for children with additional needs who need to travel to a place of learning that is not within walking distance or is not their local place of education. However, the way that is applied often leads to rather negative outcomes for these children.
There are obviously financial constraints on local authorities, which are obliged to provide home-to-school transport, and that often leads them to going with the lowest possible bid from a company that can provide it. A number of home-to-school transport companies market themselves as “specialists”. In reality, however, their staff have minimal specialist training, which often consists only of how to correctly load and unload a wheelchair, and the vehicles are often highly unsuitable for transporting children with special educational needs—sometimes it might just be a taxi. Obligations are placed on parents, who can be deeply worried about putting their child in a car with an unfamiliar person, particularly if that child is non-verbal or has communication difficulties. Safeguarding concerns often come to the fore.
There also does not appear to be a great deal of monitoring or holding of companies to account for the service that they provide. Parents in my constituency tell me that their home-to-school transport turns up late or fails to turn up at all, and that getting replacement drivers or assistance for their children is a regular occurrence. One parent said that if they were taking their child to school and regularly dropped them off half an hour late, the school would have something to say about it. Indeed, schools quite often like to send messages out to parents—as they should—to remind them of the importance of punctuality and being at school on time. Lateness has a huge knock-on effect for children and young people. Disabled children are often at a disadvantage to their peers to begin with, and if a child needs a routine in their day and to begin their day in a certain way, constantly turning up late to class and having to be signed in at the office can put a real dampener on their day.
The costs of home-to-school transport have been increasing for some time, and I believe it is projected that they will continue to increase. The Minister will probably speak about how the SEND reforms will go some way to address that. The County Councils Network, among others, has called for the Government to consider means-testing home-to-school transport for disabled children. It highlighted cases where councils were sending transport to pick children up to travel sometimes for upwards of an hour and a half each day and claimed that that was unsustainable. To be clear, we do not means- test education for anyone in this country, and I do not believe that parents who happen to have a disabled child should be treated any differently here.
There is a hidden cost of having a disabled child that an income-based means test would not take into account, as has been pointed out by Contact, the charity for disabled children and their families. Often, a child has to travel a long distance to go to a school that meets their needs because the system has catastrophically failed to meet their needs any closer to home. That failure usually lands squarely at the door of the local authority, which attempts to dodge having to pay for it by means-testing and putting the onus back on parents. It is reprehensible that a system that has failed to provide an education, failed to intervene early enough to stop issues escalating, and failed to find somewhere suitable to educate someone close to their home tries to make parents pay for the privilege of sending their child to a special educational needs establishment a long distance away. I would welcome the Minister’s assurance that there are no plans to introduce means testing of parents of special educational needs and disabled children for home-to-school transport.
I will touch briefly on another aspect of the system that probably could do with changing. The statutory duty to provide home-to-school transport for children with SEND currently covers those between five and 16 and those between 19 and 25. That leaves ages nought to five not covered—in some cases, children begin school at age four, which leaves a year-long gap during which the parent has to take them to school until the duty kicks in when the child turns five—and a gap between 16 and 19, where it seems that legislation has not kept pace. We acknowledge that some people require additional education until age 25, but we do not have the statutory cover for them to receive transport to get to a place of education.
I will leave it there, as I think I have gone over my six minutes.