Memorandum submitted by the Parents Autism
Campaign for Education (ST 14)
PACE is national parent-led charity established
in 1998 to educate the public, policy-makers and opinion-formers
about the needs of children with autism and their families. Our
primary aim is to improve the educational opportunities available
to all children with autism.
PACE fully supports the submission on the draft
School Transport Bill produced by the Special Educational Consortium,
of which PACE is a member. This supplementary submission is intended
to highlight the particular difficulties children with autistic
spectrum disorders (ASDs) experience in traveling to school.
Many children with an ASD will experience oversensitivity
to different sensory stimuli (light, noise, touch etc). These,
combined with the communication impairments inherent in autism,
will make shared transport fundamentally inaccessible for many
children with an ASD. The presumption in the prospectus accompanying
the draft Bill (para 27) is that children with SEN will share
transport with their peers, or will share journeys and vehicles
with other disabled children. This presumption is likely to make
it harder to parents to persuade LEAs of the need to fund individual
school transport, for example taxis. This is explicitly acknowledged
in the draft regulatory impact assessment, which states that:
We are encouraging LEAs to consider mainstreaming
SEN transport where appropriate, and to consider taxi sharing
or alternative forms of transport for pupils with SEN such as
minibuses. It is possible that new arrangements might decrease
the use of taxis. [1]
Two case studies below highlight the importance
of a dedicated school transport service in giving children with
ASD access to educational provision:
CASE 1
An 11 year old boy with ASD and severe learning
difficulties. He has LEA transport to a special school, along
with three other children from his LEA and two escorts in a minibus.
His behaviour is becoming increasingly challenging such that several
incidents occur on journeys to school, and questions are raised
about the safety of the other children and the ratio of children
to escorts. The solution is for the child to come in his own taxi,
with his own escort. His parents are not in a position to drive
him to school every day.
While this individual transport is undoubtedly
costly for the LEA, the alternative would be for the child to
remain at home or to attend a residential special school, a far
more costly and less desirable option. The proposed arrangements
mean that he is able to remain with his family and access a special
school within his own community, a key outcome of an inclusive
education policy.
CASE 2
A nine-year-old boy with autism and severe learning
disability. After a continuing dialogue over several years between
the family and the LEA over the child's needs, the LEA agreed
to put a non-maintained school in Part IV of the statement. However,
they also put a maintained LEA school in Part IV, stating that
they would respect parental preference and fund the former, even
though they believed both schools could meet the child's needs.
This was understood to be a way of ensuring that the parents could
not press for LEA transport to the non-maintained school. In this
case, the family were prepared to accept this wording and organise
transport themselves, even though they disputed the LEA claim
that the maintained LEA school offered appropriate provision for
the child's needs. They were acutely aware that they were in a
privileged position and another family would not have been able
to arrange transport, and would have been forced to take the LEA
to SENDIST to secure both the provision and the necessary transport.
In the current climate of reduced statementing,
the successful delivery of SEN provision will rely more than ever
on the creation of trust between parents, schools and LEAs. Initiatives
such as the draft School Transport Bill which tend to erode entitlements
to existing provision will greatly damage this trust, and may
prevent the successful delivery of the Government's Strategy for
SEN. PACE supports the recommendations for amendments to the draft
Bill made by the Special Educational Consortium, and particularly
urges Committee members to question the presumption that children
with SEN should share transport to school. As a minimum, the guidance
to the legislation should require LEAs to take account of whether
a pupil has a social or communication disorder which may make
group transport inaccessible.
Steve Broach
Assistant Director
PACE (Parents Autism Campaign for Education)
April 2004
1 DfES, School Travel Schemes-Draft Bill and Prospectus,
p37 Back
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