The Department for Education’s top civil servant has warned against imposing a “blanket duty” on councils arranging transport for disabled learners amid soaring spend on post-16 transport that has outpaced pre-16 costs.
Young people in England must remain in education or training until age 18, but there is no legal duty for local authorities to provide free transport for SEND students over 16. It is instead a discretionary service.
In a scrutiny session by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) yesterday, Susan Acland-Hood, permanent secretary in the DfE since 2020, told MPs that it was appropriate to have a different framework for determining transport arrangements for disabled 16-18 learners, but a “blanket duty” would be difficult due to the widespread provision across the country.
She told MPs that young people want to make the “right” choices on their education that might mean a trade-off between travelling “significantly longer distances” and the “rightness of the provision”.
“We see patterns of travel for 16 to 19 are much more widespread because there’s a much wider range of choice of settings,” she said, adding that a blanket set of entitlements could constrain where young people are able to go.
Acland-Hood also revealed that post-16 transport spending has shot up by 170 per cent nationally since 2015-16, a higher rate than the 140 per cent increase in pre-16 spending for the same period.
The PAC arranged the scrutiny session on home-to-school transport after the National Audit Office (NAO) recently found “significant” barriers to participation for young people with SEND stemming from cost pressures from councils providing transport.
In October, the spending watchdog reported that councils’ annual transport costs have soared to £2.3 billion, and the Department for Education estimates they could exceed £3 billion by 2029-30.
The NAO found that the government does not have the data needed to understand who is using the transport and why costs are rising.
Here are the key highlights from the PAC session:
‘Blanket duty’ difficult to impose
Councils do not legally have to provide free transport for 16-18 learners or 19-25 aged learners with education, health and care plans (EHCPs), but can provide travel allowances, shared transport or personal travel budgets. Some have introduced parental financial contributions for council-arranged transport.
They are, however, required to make sure no young person is prevented from attending education. Acland-Hood said councils are adhering to that “broader duty” seriously.
“We do, however, recognise that sometimes the provision will change for children as they get older through the system, and that local authorities may use that moment of the change in support to lift it again,” she said.
Acland-Hood added: “Although there isn’t a statutory duty of the same force there, we don’t think local authorities are wholesale removing that support.”
The permanent secretary said the department is aware of more widespread patterns of travel for 16 to 19 learners due to a “much wider range of choice of settings”.
“[It] also might mean that it’s increasingly right for them to make the trade-off between the challenge of travel and the rightness of the provision, and that makes it hard to produce a blanket duty.”
The House of Commons education committee called for an extension of the statutory duty to FE SEND students aged 16 to 25 in their FE and skills inquiry. The government’s response, published today, said that councils are already required to annually publish the arrangements they consider necessary to facilitate attendance for 16–18-year-olds and 19-25 students with an EHCP.
Transport not linked to rising NEETs
The NAO’s report warned that councils “scaling back” their post-16 provision could increase NEET numbers and the impact could be felt more by disabled young people.
NEET numbers have soared in recent years, edging close to the one million mark. Current figures from the Office for National Statistics estimate around 946,000 young people aged 16 to 24 were NEET.
Addressing the concerns, Acland-Hood refuted that lack of transport access was driving the increase and that it was more about the disempowerment of young people to become economically active.
“Transport is obviously something which improves access to the labour market,” she told MPs.
“I think it may be more about what are we doing to try and make sure that young people aren’t getting to the age of 16 or 18 feeling like they’re disempowered, not able to enter the labour market, and there may be some transport component in that.
“I don’t think it’s quite as clear.”
Data ‘central’ to understanding gaps in provision
The session also addressed gaps and low response rates in home-to-school transport data collection from local councils.
Around 50,000 post-16 learners receive council-funded transport, based on DfE’s inaugural data collection survey back in February from 153 local authorities in England.
But the survey only garnered a 75 per cent response rate, to which DfE vowed it was planning to make it mandatory for local authorities to routinely report.
Anna Bird, chief executive of Contact, a charity which supports families with disabled children, told MPs there was a real “lack of data” to show the knock-on effect of the lack of school transport on attendance.
The spending watchdog also confirmed “insufficient” data to judge how any changes to home-to-school transport might impact attendance.
A Natspec survey last year revealed anecdotal evidence of specialist colleges experiencing learners dropping out or reducing attendance due to revoked council-arranged transport for young people with SEND.
“Data is central to understanding the challenges and pressures that we see in systems,” Juliet Chua, DfE’s director general for schools, told MPs.
She admitted that the government had not received enough “detailed data” of the different modes of transport that young people take and confirmed next year’s collection will ask for more detail.
Determining ‘socially necessary’ transport services
Acland-Hood confirmed DfE is working with the Department for Transport (DfT) on non-statutory guidance to help transport authorities determine services that are “socially necessary”.
Chua also referenced the integration of transport provision into local planning in the post-16 white paper, which stated strategic authorities will have a stronger role in transport interventions to “tailor progression pathways to jobs”.
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