U-turn over special needs school buses

BIRMINGHAM’S education chief has admitted letting down children with special needs after their bus services were withdrawn and pupils sent standard bus passes instead.

But council education director Colin Diamond insisted the service was getting back on track after a management overhaul and many of the school bus services had been reinstated.

Birmingham City Council was inundated with complaints after hundreds of pupils were told in June and July that under the Travel Assist policy they were no longer entitled to a special bus from September.

These included four-year-old Nicholas Bolton, who is severely autistic and needs round-the-clock care, but was given a pass to catch three buses from his Bournville home to Uffculme School in Moseley.

Mr Diamond said this was obviously a wrong decision, and his school bus was reinstated just a week before the start of the new term.

Many other parents have now had their transport reinstated. But one parent Yuko Richards said: “The uncertainty and anxiety that has been caused to hard pressed, exhausted families has been immense.”

The council reviewed 850 Travel Assist cases of which about 300 appealed against refusal. A further 80 took stage two appeals and many decisions were reversed by the new management.

But the council fears parents who have been away for the summer may have a shock when their usual school bus fails to collect their child for the first day back this week.

It has drafted in extra staff to help investigate and deal with complaints.

Mr Diamond said: “We found there were issues at the end of the summer term and we immediately put in new management and overhauled the approach to Travel Assist.

“Where it was pretty obvious that a wrong decision had been made we did not wait for an appeal to come in.”

The reduction of pupils needing specialist school buses would have helped with budget cuts of £2.6 million faced by the department.

But parents were given no space on standard application forms to highlight particular issues such as having to take siblings to a different school at the same time.

But following a management overhaul in late July there was a review of all cases. Mr Diamond stressed there were no targets and each child was treated as an individual.

He said: “We have removed a blanket entitlement, but that does not mean that we have removed the entitlement of individual children to

a special school transport.”