Many children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) must travel long distances to schools that can meet their needs. The PAC’s January 2025 report on support for children and young people with special educational needs noted that a lack of state school capacity for children with SEND was contributing to larger SEND transport spending as more children travel longer distances to suitable schools. The report found that home to school transport has seen a 77% real terms cost increase since 2015. Local authority spending on transport reached £2.3bn in 2023-24. The PAC called on government to improve its data on home-to-school transport and to ensure spending on it provided value for money, and a data collection exercise on home-to-school transport was launched in response.
The PAC’s June 2025 report on local government financial sustainability laid out the pressure that increased demand for SEND provision was having on local authority budgets. The report warned that SEND spending has outstripped the money available from central government to pay for it, with local authority deficits expected to hit up to £3.9bn a year by the end of 2027-28. Following the PAC’s report, government announced that it would be extending the accounting workaround keeping high needs spending off local authorities’ balance sheets by a further two years.
The National Audit Office reports in 2025 on home to school transport, in a study considering the commissioning of, and spending on, transport by local authorities in England. Following the NAO’s report, the PAC will conduct its own scrutiny with evidence from senior Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Department for Education officials, and others. Likely topics for scrutiny include:
- How to manage rising demand;
- Available support for young people; and
- Efforts to contain costs.
If you have evidence on these issues, please submit here by 23:59 on Monday 24 November 2025.
Please look at the requirements for written evidence submissions and note that the Committee cannot accept material as evidence that is published elsewhere. You can request anonymity or confidentiality when you send evidence, but it is the Committee which decides what information to publish and how. It may treat submissions confidentially, even where you have not requested this.
Please note that the Committee’s inquiry cannot assist with individual cases. If you need help with an individual problem you are having, you may wish to read the information on Parliament’s website about who you can contact with different issues.