Flaws exposed in proposal to axe special school transport

The consultation event at Brooke School in Rugby yesterday (13 July 2015) exposed flaws in the tories' proposals to axe special school transport.

At their cabinet meeting in June Warwickshire's top tories considered proposals from Cllr Colin Hayfield of Church Farm, Coleshill to shift more of the costs of home to school transport from the county's budget to parents' pockets. The conservative cabinet decided to put these proposals out for public consultation - see http://rugby.lib.dm/a9Zj6 . Full details of the wide ranging proposals can be found here: https://askwarks.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/home-to-school-transport-consultation-2015. The consultation runs until 17 September 2015.

A consultation meeting on the special school element of the proposal was held at the Brooke School. Under this aspect of the tories' proposals the county council would no longer offer all parents of special school pupils home to school transport. Instead the county council would carry out an assessment of all pupils who lived within three miles of the school, first when they joined the school and secondly when the pupils became eleven. The county council suggests that the special school element of their proposed policy might eventually transfer costs of half a million pounds from the county's purse to the parents' pockets.

However at the consultation event it rapidly became clear that the proposals were badly thought through:

(a) Education officials admitted that the "vast majority" of special school pupils would continue to need special transport arrangements and yet the savings are based on two in every five pupils being found "ineligible" for transport.

(b) The method the county council would use to carry out assessments had not been thought through. "We don't know what the assessment process would be" the officials admitted - all they could say was that it would involve both the parents and the headteacher.

(c) At least some of the possible savings were counted twice as another part of the county council's proposals were to reduce the cost of special school taxis by offering parents a "mileage allowance" to make their own arrangements for taking children to school.

(d) No one could say whether some of the county councils around Warwickshire who had introduced a similar policy had made any savings at all.