Recommendation 23

HM Government Accepted

40. The eligibility criteria for free home-to-school travel are set out in primary legislation, but the legislation does not prescribe the travel arrangements local authorities should make for eligible children. The Government’s statutory home-to-school travel guidance, updated in January 2024, is already clear that local authorities are responsible for deciding what travel arrangements to make, provided they are suitable for the needs of the children for which they are made. The Government has no expectation that local authorities should arrange expensive individual forms of transport except where that is what the needs of the child dictate. 41. Local authorities have told us that managing parents’ expectations can be challenging. To support them with this, we recently published a blog post aimed at helping parents understand whether their child is eligible for free travel and, if so, what transport they can reasonably expect their local authority to provide. 42. This directly addresses some of the common concerns that local authorities let us know parents raise, including explaining that children will often need to share a vehicle with other children and that they may be expected to walk to a suitable pick-up point if they are able to. We have let local authorities know that they are welcome to refer to this post in their own communications. The blog post can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/mtb3zj57. We have asked the Association of Directors and Children’s Services (ADCS) and the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport (ADEPT) to amplify these messages on their own communication channels. 43. The updated statutory home-to-school travel guidance, on which we worked closely with local authorities, now provides clearer guidance on many areas and explains the importance of taking travel costs into account when planning the supply of school places, and of local transport and SEND teams working together. The Government is considering what more we can do to support local authorities, including how to get expert help to meet a child’s complex medical needs on transport. Further information will be available in due course. 44. In terms of funding, the majority of central Government funding for home-to-school travel is made available to local authorities through the Local Government Finance Settlement (LGFS), which will make available up to £64.7 billion in 2024/25, including the additional £500 million of funding for adult and children’s social care announced on 24 January. This additional funding will, in turn, reduce pressures on other areas of children’s services such as home-to-school transport. We are committed to improving the local government finance system beyond this Settlement in the next Parliament and the Minister for Local Government will be engaging with the sector on this over the coming months. 45. The Department for Education provides additional grant funding to local authorities as a contribution towards the cost of ‘extended rights’ travel to support school choice for low-income families – this is just under £45.8 million in 2023-24. 46. The SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan, published in March 2023, set out a vision for inclusive high-quality mainstream provision where children have their needs identified early and can access prompt support. More children will have their needs met in mainstream settings without the need to travel long distances to access the support they need. In addition, home-to-school travel will be a central consideration in developing new policy on tailored lists and in Local Area Inclusion Plans (LAIPs). We will be working closely with local authorities in the SENDAP Change Programme on this. Together with £2.6 billion of Government investment in new local special and alternative provision places and improvements to existing places between 2022 and 2025, this should reduce home to school travel costs over time. The Spring Budget further committed an initial £105 million towards 15 new special free schools, creating over 2,000 additional places.