The Post-16 transport puzzle: doing the right thing in a system that makes it hard

This morning, Cabinet agreed a revised Post-16 Travel Assistance Policy for young people with an Education, Health and Care Plan. It was a difficult decision, taken after a consultation that drew 187 responses, the overwhelming majority of which expressed concern. I want to use this post to talk honestly about why I think we've made the right call, what frustrates me deeply about the system we're operating within, and why the conversation about SEND transport in a rural county like Wiltshire is far from over.

A system full of contradictions

Let me start with something that has bothered me throughout this process.

If a young person with SEND is 15, the law requires us to provide free home-to-school transport where they meet the eligibility criteria under section 508B of the Education Act 1996. If that same young person turns 16 and continues in education, there is no statutory duty to provide free transport at all — it becomes entirely discretionary, with the council required only to publish a Post-16 Transport Policy Statement setting out what arrangements it considers necessary. If they then turn 19 and remain in education with an EHCP, a statutory duty returns under section 508F: where the council considers transport "necessary" for an adult learner with an EHCP to attend their setting, it must be provided free of charge.

So the legal entitlement, broadly, runs: yes, then no, then yes again.

There is one important caveat to that. In exceptional cases, the SEND Code of Practice (paragraph 9.215) allows transport to be specified directly within an EHCP where the child or young person has particular transport needs. Where that happens, the transport becomes part of the legally binding provision in the plan. But these are exceptional cases, not the norm — the vast majority of EHCPs do not specify transport, and the standard statutory framework above is what applies to most learners.

The young person hasn't changed. Their needs haven't changed. Their geography hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed is their birthday. And yet the framework we operate within treats those three years between 16 and 19 as a statutory no-man's-land, where local authorities are expected to make ends meet on goodwill, discretion and a shrinking budget.

It is, frankly, a silly system. It reflects neither how young people actually develop nor how families actually live their lives. And it puts councils like ours in the impossible position of trying to do the right thing within a framework that wasn't designed with them in mind.

Rural Wiltshire is not urban anywhere

The consultation responses were unambiguous on one point above all others: rurality changes everything.

Public transport policy is largely written by people thinking about cities. Frequent buses. Trains every fifteen minutes. A tube map. The ability to step out of your front door and find a route to wherever you need to go.

Wiltshire is not that. Wiltshire is a county where the bus to the next village runs twice a day, where evening services dry up entirely, and where some of our specialist Post-16 settings — Fairfield Specialist College in Dilton Marsh being the obvious example — sit in locations that simply cannot be reached by public transport on anything resembling a sensible schedule. Around 35% of all Post-16 learners with an EHCP attend Fairfield. Most of them currently arrive by Council-commissioned taxi.

When national policy assumes Independent Travel Training will get young people onto a bus, that assumption breaks the moment you cross the M4 heading south. It's not that travel training doesn't work — it absolutely does, and I'll come to that. It's that the bus has to actually exist for travel training to be the answer.

This is why our policy is stepped, not blanket. It's why contracted transport remains on the table for those who genuinely need it. And it's why I will keep pushing back, hard, against any suggestion that rural authorities can simply adopt the same approach as our urban counterparts. We can't. The geography won't let us.

Why I genuinely believe in travel training

For all my frustration with the framework, I want to be clear about something: where Independent Travel Training is right for a young person, it is one of the most transformative things we can offer.

Think about what travel independence actually means. It means being able to get yourself to a job interview. It means being able to meet a friend in town on a Saturday. It means going to the cinema, joining a club, attending a medical appointment, picking up a prescription, visiting a relative — without having to ask someone else to drive you there.

For young people with SEND, that independence is not a small thing. It is the difference between an adulthood that's lived inside the family home and an adulthood that's lived in the community. It is the difference between social isolation and social connection. It is, in many cases, the difference between employment and unemployment, between mental wellbeing and mental ill-health, between a life with options and a life without them.

Our Community Connecting Team in Wiltshire is genuinely good at this work. They meet young people where they are. They go at the right pace. They build confidence in stages, alongside someone the young person trusts, until the bus journey that once felt impossible becomes routine.

When that lands — and it does land, repeatedly — what we've given that young person is not a bus pass. It's a future.

That's why I keep returning to the same point: the primary motivation for this policy change is not financial. It is preparing young people for adulthood. The savings matter, but they sit firmly in second place behind the question of what kind of life we want our young people to have access to.

The bit that keeps me up at night

Here's where I want to be honest in a way that perhaps a council report doesn't allow me to be.

I worry about the parents.

I worry about parents who have been carrying the weight of advocating for their child for years before this conversation even started — fighting for an EHCP, fighting for the right placement, fighting for therapy, fighting for the diagnosis, fighting just to be heard. I worry about parents who are already exhausted, already running on reserves they didn't know they had, and who now read in a council newsletter that something else they relied on is being reviewed, reshaped, or asked of them.

The financial pressures on local government are not going away. They are getting worse. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not paying attention. And every time we have to look at our budget and ask "what can change?", the people who feel that change most acutely are the families who were already at full stretch.

A parent reading this policy may see the words "individual assessment" and "stepped approach" and "we'll consider every case on its merits" — and what they may hear is "more forms, more meetings, more appeals, more uncertainty, more nights spent worrying whether their child will be able to get to college in September." I understand that. I do not dismiss it. I have heard it loud and clear in the consultation responses, in the Wiltshire Parent Carers Council submission, in conversations with families, and in the questions submitted to Cabinet today.

The honest truth is that I cannot promise families that this will be the last change. I would be lying if I did. The wider SEND system is under review nationally. The financial settlement for local government is under pressure. Demand for EHCPs continues to rise — Wiltshire alone now maintains 7,062 of them, with over 1,000 new applications this year. Something, somewhere, will continue to give.

What I can promise is this: when we make changes, we will explain them honestly. We will consult properly. We will build in appeals. We will protect those mid-course. We will keep contracted transport available for those who genuinely need it. And we will keep the door open to families who want to talk to us about what's happening in their lives.

That isn't enough. I know it isn't enough. But it's what I can offer, and it's what I will keep offering for as long as I hold this portfolio.

Where this leaves us

The policy passed today applies to young people entering Post-16 education from September 2026. No young person currently part-way through a two-year course will see their arrangements change. The stepped approach — public transport with travel training first, Personal Travel Budget where that isn't viable, Spare Seats Scheme where it works, contracted transport where nothing else does — is the most graduated, most individualised approach we could reasonably build within the constraints we face.

It is not a perfect policy. There is no perfect policy available, because the framework above us isn't perfect. But it is, I believe, a defensible one — and one that takes seriously both the financial reality and the human reality of the families it affects.

To the families who responded to the consultation, who came to the webinar, who wrote to me directly, who submitted questions to Cabinet: thank you. Genuinely. You have made this a better policy than it would otherwise have been, and you have made me think harder about every word of it.

The conversation continues. My door, as always, remains open.