Almost half a million children are eligible for taxpayer-funded transport to get to school, and tens of thousands with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) are entitled to travel alone in taxis every day, figures reveal.
The Department for Education data, shared exclusively with The Times, shows that about 470,000 pupils in England — 6 per cent of all schoolchildren under 16 — are eligible for home-to-school transport (HTST).
Like the Americans.
Might even be able to get the Variety Club to fund ’em.
All of this at colossal cost. On the way to the airport in the summer, the driver was complaining that he’d lost a couple of these gigs, meaning he was several hundred quid a week down.
Mis-statement. Children going to a Special School share taxis IF they cannot get there on their own and neither parent can take them. Just like children going to mainstream schools except that the LEA pays for the shared taxi.
I used to take myself and two younger siblings to primary school. The LEA wasn’t on the hook for taxis.
But how far did you have to walk? There are a lot of villages near where I live that have no bus service.
Walked 1/2 mile to bus stop, then 10 minutes on bus, and another 1/4 mile to the school.
I mile to school. And I used to go home for lunch…..
https://www.facebook.com/reel/663062746855038
He forget the rain, the snow and the three years from 1968 – 71 when we went to school in the dark cos they didn’t put the clocks back though……. x x x x
A few weeks ago I saw at the cost of a particular SEND child. It would be cheaper for the taxpayer to subsidise his parents to move house to be next door to the school than to pay for the bloody transport.
They pick them up from next door, or at least directly opposite the school to drive them 20 yards. I’ve seen it near me.
“Institute the short bus”.
Nice idea, but by the time the LEA have paid for everything involved in running a minibus it’d probably cost more than the £8,900 average per child per year it costs to just use taxis.
I wonder if the perceived need for minibuses to take kids from remote locations ( +2 miles?) to school is to deal with 2 issues:
1) The vibrancy infesting many parts who are seen as a danger to the young.
2) A wish to reduce the number of parents doing the school run & clogging up the roads after all the whining about ratrunners / pollution from half empty cars.
That is the situation in my corner of America. But I would add to your 1) that a some of it is social stigma from taking the bus. “What, your mom can’t bring you?”
The result in my corner of the county is 60-passenger buses carrying maybe 5 kids. In fact, one bus ritually stops every morning up the street from me and NO ONE is ever there.
Rules. Your kid can’t just get on the bus that stops down the street that goes to his school. Parents must apply/record with the school district that their kid will take the bus. They have to sign up for it (!). What does that accomplish? EVERY PARENT signs up their kid to take the bus. Just in case. Then they still drive them to school. The school district has documentation that 95% of kids are going to take the bus. Great rule. Makes some bureaucrat happy.
From the Times Education Supplement: “This is an increase of 100,650 children (or 6.4 per cent) on 2023, when there were 1,572,555 pupils with SEND. This upwards trend is consistent with recent years: there has been a 31.2 per cent increase since 2016, when 1,228,787 pupils had SEND.”
The Times Education Supplement of course views this as a crisis rather than HOW THE FUCK HAS THE NUMBER OF RETARDS RISEN 31% IN A DECADE.
Even with the importation of cousin fuckers, that’s not adding 400,000 retards to the population. But you know, you get some vague stuff around mental health combined with parents who would like someone to take their kids to school, a bit of free tutoring and what do you know, there’s loads more of them.
You get more of what you pay more for.
HOW THE FUCK HAS THE NUMBER OF RETARDS RISEN 31% IN A DECADE.
Demographic change? What sector of the population has risen 31%?
As I said, I am not denying the cousin fucker problem, but I don’t think that accounts for another 300,000 cases.
There’s a huge overprescription of autism going on. It used to be Rain Man types. Really severe, socially dysfunctional types that completely live in their own world. It’s been extended to weird obsessive nerds. And parents are grifting it. Like why wouldn’t you take advantage, if you could?
Yeah, but it’s mostly just incentives. Pretend you have mental elf and you get a nicer and easier life. Fuck me, if I were a schoolkid now I’d be doing my utmost to play that card. I’d be a fool not to.
What could go wrong?
Chap I know from the village pub was an insurance salesman covering quite a bit of the south-west.
Got made redundant and bought himself a car and set up as a chauffeur type. He makes a better living transferring feral kids to and from ‘home’ to ‘school’.
The only downside is he has to have his car equipped with cameras and recording devices to fend off the inevitable claims of sexual and other impropriety (inevitable in the sense that the kids are liars and chancers, not that he will inevitably assault any of them).
Costs us around £60k a year, without factoring in the fact that we’re also funding the housing, the parents, and in time the prisons and dole.
My wife works in corporate finance and a while back was looking at the sale (or refinance, I can’t remember) of a single property containing one kid and a 24/7 roster of ‘care’ staff. I can’t remember the exact cost to the taxpayer of running this one fucking place, but it wasn’t far shy of a million quid a year.
We do not deserve to survive as a society, and without truly radical and unpleasant changes we will not.
“the proportion of children needing to be placed in the most costly, external placement homes, continued to increase during 2024. There are currently 42 children in external residential placement care. The complexity of children’s needs is driving this increase, at a time where finite capacity in the specific market is leading to ever increasing prices being demanded for accommodation. The average weekly cost of a placement has increased by over 40% over the last three years. The average cost of a new external placement since September 2024 has been £5,100 per week (range £4,125 to £7,000), with the current highest cost external placement being in excess of £12,000 per week.”
Say council tax is £160 a month – that’s 300 Council Taxes.
That’s Hartlepool in Jan 2025 – probably double those numbers for anywhere south of the Wilts & Berks canal.
The exclusive data has now been shared with the BBC.
“Tens of thousands” is factually incorrect – 10 out of 11 of SEND pupils who have a taxi share it, only 1 in 11 travel alone, so that’s less than 20k *not* 10s of thousands.
Yes, it costs because the Education Act demands that each parent sends their child to a suitable school (or provides home-schooling to an equivalent standard).
60% of those using taxis do NOT have Special Educational Needs.
Also FYI Western Bloke – SEND does not mean “Retard” – when I was taking my elder son to the local NACG (National Association of Gifted Children) meetings a significant minority had “statements” (of Special Educational Needs) because the school system had let them down badly and several of these shared taxis taking them to the nearest schools to their homes that were willing to teach children with an IQ over 160.
SEND means someone who does not fit in to the bureaucrat’s categories and/or to the school’s plan. My son was doing fine in a primary school which put him in his own age group for PE and Music and in a class three years older for all other lessons until a nasty LEA bureaucrat decided that he couldn’t go to secondary school at 8 and mucked things up.
I don’t understand. Can schools really choose not to teach children with an IQ over 160)? Why is it an insuperable problem for them?
It’s not that they decide to cut off the over-160 kids from schooling. It’s that they don’t offer anything appropriate for them. Gifted programs serve the patriarchy, ya know.
One school refused to take my son because they had a couple of gifted children who were in a class one year older and the school assumed that they would have been offended if he was put in a class two (let alone three) years older and they were not.
If he had been in its catchment area they could not have openly refused just made it insurmountably difficult (actually that one was a decent school and was merely trying to protect its existing pupils).
Can’t the school teach the very bright kids the standard curriculum and (when the kid is bored) the parents stretch them with activities at home?
They could IF they wanted to do so – but that requires extra effort (and that often costs money out of the school budget) and some teachers dislike any kids who are obviously cleverer than they are themselves.
Secondly what does the teacher do if one kid has finished the work set for the class halfway through the lesson? When I was in the lower sixth I used to borrow the newspaper of the boy sitting next to me and do the crossword; my son was, when aged six(!) caught reading a maths book under the desk …
When the kids are bored at school, parents “stretching” them with activities at home isn’t a solution for the teacher.