That’s because there is no way on earth that these councils have financial problems due to meeting the cost of providing an appropriate education for children with non-standard educational requirements. They have financial problems because they have been inadequately funded by central government and a council tax system that is clearly not working appropriately, especially with regard to more expensive properties.
In other words, I am suggesting that the framing of this story and headline, which appears to imply children and their parents or guardians who stand up and demand what those in their care need, is wrong because it appears to blame those children for a financial situation for which they have no responsibility at all.
The answer is MOAR TAX rather than even the mildest suggestion that we – say – move to the short bus solution.
If you don’t want to pass transport costs on to parents, at what point is it worth paying parents to move nearer the school? I some will be racking up £10k+ a year for over a decade. That’s a decent chunk of the cost of a house if you’re outside London, which the longer taxi rides likely are.
I wonder if councils have been shifting costs for difficult children from Childrens Services (funded by Council Tax) into support for SEND schools (delimited and funded by sending an invoice to the Treasury every year) so there’s been no incentive to restrain costs.
Just speculating ‘cos the articles linked to don’t make it clear at all.
Is SEND a euphemism for what I knew in childhood as mental defectives?
I can see that you can’t let the poor souls travel on an ordinary bus. Are there enough of them that one taxi could transport two or three? Or would that need a supervisor with them too? I suppose that’s just a variant on the “short bus” solution.
In fact, how does the taxi driver cope with even a lone child? Does Mummy go to?
A moderate degree of intelligence would provide a minibus with a classroom assistant working a bit of overtime to collect the children attending a Special Needs school (augmented by taxi, which could sometimes be shared, for children living in the opposite direction from the majority/larger clusters). Ditto in the evening with a different classroom assistant. My (Conservative-majority) LEA does so – I know because I occasionally see the minibus.
@ dearieme
If the child cannot cope with a shortish taxi journey without Mum, he/she won’t get through a school day.
The LEA has a team of taxi drivers who take the same children every day – I assume it pays them a bit extra becausethey have to fit their days around the school run five days a week
What about appropriate education for the bright kids who can handle a faster pace?
Why not minibuses? I know this one!
Back in 1997, the thoughtful people at the Department for Transport decided that anyone who passed their driving test after 1 January 1997 would no longer be automatically entitled to drive a minibus “for hire or reward”.
If you’re a foreigner (as most of our minicab drivers seem to be these days) then your foreign car licence doesn’t let you drive a minibus either.
Getting a D1 minibus licence will set you back around £1,000. It’s simply not worthwhile for most minicab drivers, when they can simply drive an eight-seater minivan on a car licence.
Given the 1997 cut-off, and an average test-pass age of 23, most people under 51 can’t drive a minibus for hire.
A decade or so ago there was a reality series (benefits street or something similar) where, if I remember correctly, the residents of a chosen street were told how much the council was spending on each of them and invited to get together and decide on the fairest apportionment.
When it was revealed that an able-bodied single mother was having her equally able-bodied daughter (not special needs) ferried to and from school by taxi every day it did not go down at all well with her neighbours. (This was well before the demographic changes which make a young girl’s daily walk to school less than ideal).
And that’s when it all kicked off.
“What about appropriate education for the bright kids who can handle a faster pace?”
That used to be automatic where I lived: we called it “streaming”. I benefitted from it in both primary and secondary school. Then the Forces of Progress successfully waged war against it. Bastards.
@dearieme – March 31, 2025 at 10:28 am
That used to be automatic where I lived: we called it “streaming”.
In my day it used to be called “grammar school”… Largely abolished ‘thanks’ to Labour’s Highgate School and Trinity College, Oxford – educated, Charles Anthony Raven Crosland.
More fascism news, candidly. The wicked flee when no man pursueth:
Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada
Jason Stanley, who says grandmother fled Berlin with his father in 1939, says US may become ‘fascist dictatorship’
A Yale professor who studies fascism is leaving the US to work at a Canadian university because of the current US political climate, which he worries is putting the US at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”.
Jason Stanley, who wrote the 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
Stanley told the Daily Nous, a philosophy profession website, that he made the decision “to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship”.
He said in an interview that Columbia University’s recent actions moved him to accept the offer. Last Friday, Columbia gave in to the Trump administration by agreeing to a series of demands in order to restore $400m in federal funding. These changes include crackdowns on protests, increased security power and “internal reviews” of some academic programs, like the Middle Eastern studies department.
“When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted – that whole way of thinking pre-supposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy,” he said.
America is healing.
Steve,
Any stories like this could be ended accurately with the phrase, “…and nothing of value was lost.”
MG – idk how the United States is going to cope without one of their foremost experts on fascism (it’s fascism when the government does something I don’t like, bigots)
But in this case, America’s loss is also Canada’s loss. No doubt he’ll enjoy regaling the Great Brown North about the dangers of facism while they euthanise their old white people and the mentally ill and seize the bank accounts of anti-government protesters.
John,
“When it was revealed that an able-bodied single mother was having her equally able-bodied daughter (not special needs) ferried to and from school by taxi every day it did not go down at all well with her neighbours. (This was well before the demographic changes which make a young girl’s daily walk to school less than ideal).”
This is where voluntary/charity stuff works at a small level because “don’t take the piss” applies. Once you nationalise it, bureaucratise it, people take the piss and the people who manage it are 12 steps from the people paying for it. And as long as the right boxes are ticked, they don’t care.
Mini busses can be a good way of getting kids to school when they are distributed over a wide area. Bede’s school in East Sussex runs a fleet of 35 mini busses.
I don’t think this is going to work the way Labour hopes:
Labour group tells MPs they must be on YouTube and TikTok
Group asks influencers and popular figures to help party’s backbenchers engage audiences and challenge narratives
Aletha Adu Political correspondent
Sun 30 Mar 2025 13.15 CEST
Share
Confidence in the government will not improve unless they get their faces and ideas on online media platforms including YouTube, a group of Labour MPs has warned colleagues.
The Labour Growth Group of about 110 MPs is working with leading podcasters and popular figures to help Labour backbenchers become influencers in their own right, amid concerns that toxic narratives about the party’s agenda, its politicians and its policies are going unchallenged.
It’s like advising Jon Venables to seek publicity.
>appears to blame those children for a financial situation for which they have no responsibility at all.
Neither does the taxpayer. So if the children aren’t responsible and thus don’t have to pay for their own lives, why are complete strangers who are also not responsible required to pay for their own lives and someone else’s?
The universe isn’t fair. Fucking me over doesn’t make it fair for someone else, it just means *two* people are screwed instead of one.
Dude studies fascism and flees to a country that has told it’s parliament it can’t meet and is now run a single man who, because he doesn’t have a seat in parliament, is legally limited in what he can do – and is ignoring those limitations.
Fascism keeps descending on America and landing elsewhere.
Pakistani mong kids produced by cousins on the benefits gravy train isn’t news.
That taxi drivers of the same ethnicity are making out like bandits should also not surprise anyone.
Saw this comment under a DT article:
“I have a mate who lives in Pendle, it’s just near Burnley. He says that there’s something like 600 mosques in Burnley because people (well Muslims) apply to have their front room recognised as an official mosque and then they don’t have to pay any council tax. And guess what, it’s the Muslims on the council who rubber stamp the planning approval of this for their mates.”
Wait a minute
If I use a minibus instead of taxis to pick up these kids I will avoid producing so much devil gas and save the planet….
Millibrain, time to act