Written evidence submitted by The Association of Colleges (HTS0016)

 

Introduction

 

  1. The Association of Colleges (AoC) represents more than 98% of further education colleges and 52% of sixth form colleges in England. Colleges are an essential part of the country’s education system, educating over 1.6 million students every year and employing approximately 97,000 full-time equivalent staff. Rooted in local communities, they are crucial in driving social mobility and providing the skills to boost local and regional economies.

 

  1. AoC is submitting evidence because many of our member colleges’ students with SEND depend on local authority transport to get to college.

 

  1. Students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) in colleges form a significant proportion of the 0-25 SEND system created by the 2014 Children and Families Act. Some students’ disabilities mean that they need more time than other students to acquire the skills for adult life, and therefore need a longer period of time in education. Many college students, like many school pupils, require transport to get to their place of learning. The difficulties faced by college students in accessing transport are sometimes even more acute than those for school pupils because local authorities have no statutory duty to provide transport beyond the academic year of a young person’s 16th birthday. This leads to contradictory situations where a local authority commissions a college place for a young person but fails to provide the transport needed for the young person take up the place. These students have a statutory right to education yet cannot access it without transport.

 

Characteristics of the college SEND system

 

  1. The college SEND system differs from the school SEND system in two main ways.

 

  1. Firstly, the proportion of the student body who have SEND is almost twice as high in colleges. In 2023-24 15.6% of secondary school pupils either had education health and care plans (EHCPs) or received ‘SEN support’. In contrast 30.9% of college students on 16-18 study programmes had a learning difficulty or disability (LDD) – the equivalent category in colleges. Both the number of 16 to 18-year-olds and the proportion of these students who have SEND are continuing to rise.

 

  1. Secondly, the balance between specialist and mainstream providers is very different in the college sector. Both school and college sectors have both specialist and mainstream providers. However, in the college sector specialist providers educate only around 11% of all further education students with EHCPs, whereas special schools educate 41% of the corresponding school population. Mainstream colleges are more inclusive than mainstream schools and this means that many students from special schools progress to mainstream college at 16 or 18.

 

  1. Colleges’ inclusiveness comes about partly because of the colleges’ cultures and values and partly because colleges can be flexible about matching the right course to the student. College courses are varied; they include vocational and academic courses at different levels, as well as entry level courses aimed at developing students’ personal independence.

 

  1. Much discussion about the SEND system concentrates on school pupils with SEND. These pupils form the largest part of the system numerically but many will progress to college so discussion that neglects college students neglects a crucial phase of all those young people’s journey through education to adulthood.

 

Why some students need transport to college

 

  1. Students may need home-to-college transport for a number of reasons. For some, especially those with learning disabilities, travelling to college by public transport, is one of many activities in daily life that pose cognitive challenges. Other students would be able to use public transport if it was available. Additionally, some students need transport because of mobility difficulties or sensory impairments.

 

  1. Students who need transport often attend provision that is specially designed for students with SEND. This type of provision is referred to as ‘specialist provision’. It takes place in both specialist and mainstream colleges. There are around 9,600 students in colleges specialising in SEND. There are around 23,000 other students in mainstream colleges who have Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) and study on Entry Level courses or courses in Preparation for Life and Work. 

 

  1. A recent report from the ISOS partnership said that “In 2023-24, local authorities spent £2.24 billion on transporting children and young people to school and college”. Of this expenditure 67% was on journeys for pre-16 children with SEND, 10% was for 16 to 25-year-olds with SEND, and 22% for children and young people without SEND.

 

The extent of refusal of transport for college students

 

  1. Natspec, the membership body for specialist SEND colleges, published research in 2024 that showed a widespread pattern of local authorities entirely denying transport to students or restricting access in other ways, like requiring parental contributions, or setting up onerous application processes.  They found that 65% of their colleges said that transport issues had impacted attendance and one college said that 21% of their students had been affected. They also found that the situation was worsening with 59% of their respondents saying that fewer students than previously had received LA-arranged transport

 

  1. In some cases the issue was not just whether transport was supplied, but whether it was safe, with 40% of colleges saying that some students had been offered transport that was inappropriate or unsafe. Examples included adults being transported with children, insufficient wheelchair restraint systems, unreliable tail-lifts, or vehicles being too small to accommodate students’ behavioural, medical or mobility needs.

 

  1. The consequences of these problems were not limited to attendance. Survey respondents also talked about the stress suffered by students and families. The Secretary of State for Education has described the SEND system as “a system that is not working and that is too adversarial”. Natspec’s findings suggest that battles over SEND transport only add to this sense of an adversarial system.

 

  1. In mainstream colleges AoC is aware of cases where a local authority commissions a college place for a student through high needs funding, but does not fund transport to get there. These cases represent not just an adversarial relationship with families, but inconsistency between different departments of the same authority.

 

  1. AoC is also aware of multiple cases where:

 

  1. AoC has also been made aware of similar issues in post-16 providers that are not colleges, for example one post-16 Alternative Provision reports having learners with Education Health and Care Plans being referred to them, but being unbale to take up their places due to lack of reliable transport provision by local authorities.

 

  1. We are not aware of evidence that local authorities are more reluctant to grant transport to specialist rather than mainstream colleges. Although specialist provision is sometimes referred to as being ‘out of county’ and mainstream provision is sometimes referred to as ‘local’, a student’s journey to specialist provision in a GFE is not necessarily shorter than a journey to a specialist provider.

 

  1. A 2025 survey by the organisation Contact included findings about transport to post-16 education. Of cases where free transport was stopped for these young people, in 65% of cases the reason given was that the young person had turned 16, and in 18% of cases it was that they had moved into Further Education. This suggests that some local authorities are basing decisions on provider type and are willing to transport 16 to 18-year-old to a school sixth form but not to a college. Moving to Further Education is not a good reason to withdraw transport.

 

  1. Contact’s survey, like Natspec’s, found disquiet about the safety of transport with 29% of respondents (referring to learners of all ages) saying that transport was sometimes unsafe for reasons including a lack of training or expertise of the driver or accompanying staff, and “concerns around safety of drop off points”.

 

  1. This year the position seems to have deteriorated further with one local authority, Leicester City Council, threatening to withdraw transport entirely for those over 16, although their 2025-26 transport policy states that “All young people carrying on their education Post-16 must reapply for travel support via the council’s local offer pages. These will only be approved under exceptional circumstances. This is significantly different practice to previous years and is likely to affect rights to travel support even where currently being received on existing courses.”

 

Impact of transport on enrichment

 

  1. The government’s response in November 2025 to the final report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, says that “We will set out a new core enrichment offer that every school and college, in every community, should aim to provide for all children – beyond the statutory curriculum”. It continues that “We recognise the importance of opportunities for personal development experiences in 16-19 settings. At this key moment in many young people’s lives, enrichment activity can help them prepare to shape their world and thrive at work. We expect that this will help them with the skills and confidence to navigate the world of work, including gaining and keeping employment. As previously mentioned, DfE is already developing guidance for schools to deliver a high-quality enrichment offer, through an enrichment framework. Working with college leaders, we will extend this framework to further education settings.” The review and the response are correct to stress the importance of enrichment for young people. For students with SEND the rigidity of local authority transport arrangement is a barrier to students participating in activities outside their core timetabled hours. Whilst college programmes for young people with SEND include as much personal development as possible within core hours, some activities cannot be timetabled in this way, particularly those that involve students with and without SEND.

 

The role of independent travel training

 

  1. Where public transport is available, students should have the opportunity to learn how to use it. The purpose of specialist education for students with SEND is to develop students’ independence. What that means in practice is different for different individuals. For some with learning disabilities this can require explicit teaching of skills that more typically developing students simply infer in the context of their daily lives. Such skills include shopping, domestic tasks, preparing meals, accessing leisure services, communicating about their own health, and getting safely from one place to another. Travel training can develop students’ ability to travel independently. Travel training is sometimes delivered by college staff, for instance Queen Alexandra College in Birmingham has its own travel training area called ‘Independence Street’, but travel skills are often learned outside campuses. The Contact survey explored travel training and found that of young people aged 16-19 who received it, it was provided by the college in 35% of cases and the local authority in 19%. Of respondents covering all age groups, 26% had received training. Within this group training was successful in 88% of cases. Independent travel training should be part of the range of options available for getting students to college, but it is not suitable for all students and depends on public transport being available.

 

The role of public transport

 

  1. ISOS notes that if some of the money spent on assisted transport was invested “into a more comprehensive and responsive public transport infrastructure, that could in time alleviate burdens on public finances, deliver other benefits for communities and give children, young people and their families greater opportunities and freedoms…”
  2. The Transport Select Committee’s August 2025 report Buses Connecting Communities described the decline of bus services in in areas covered by county and unitary councils, and the consequences for social exclusion. The committee concluded that: “Public transport remains a major barrier to employment for young people, especially in under-served areas where limited services and high fares make it harder to reach college, training, entry-level jobs, or shift-based work”. 
  3. If fewer services are available for everyone, then this may contribute to the growth of local authorities’ costs for transporting young people with SEND. This an example of a more general phenomenon, where erosion of one service creates an increase in costs in education. If the government’s opportunity mission aims to create an effective skills system and tackle the problem of young people not in education, employment or training, then it is worth considering the role of public transport as an enabler of participation.

 

The role of local authority accountabilities

 

  1. Although transport to college works well for many students there is a pattern of decisions that limit the access to education of young people at the very stage in the education when they are preparing for a more independent adulthood. These decisions are damaging and short sighted. These decisions also suggest that local authorities are insufficiently accountable for their decisions on post-16 SEND transport.
  2. One potential accountability is the ability of families to seek redress; however this favours those families most able to navigate local authority or legal processes, and disadvantages those likely to be most severely impacted by transport refusal. The ISOS report, commissioned by the Local Government Association, notes that:

“Most local authorities have been considering the eligibility criteria for home to school transport, particularly at post-16, where the guidance allows for greatest local discretion. This had led to growing numbers of individual appeals and, in some cases, Judicial Reviews. Local authorities report that although the SEND Tribunal does not have a direct role in determining transport arrangements, Tribunal judgements, for example on placements, necessarily have an impact on the provision of transport…"

  1. The other mechanism by which local authorities are accountable for decisions around SEND is through Ofsted-CQC Area SEND inspections of local area partnerships. A new framework was introduced for these inspections in January 2023, following lengthy consultation about both the conduct of inspections and the ways in which results should be presented. Of inspections from January 2023 to March 2025, 64 local area partnerships were inspected. Of these 15 (or 23%) were graded as having “Typically positive experiences and outcomes”; 31 (or 48%) were graded as having “Inconsistent experiences and outcomes; and 18 (or 28%) were graded as having “Widespread and/or systemic failings”. These results suggest that inspections are successful in identifying issues and it is noticeable that some ‘typically positive’ partnerships previously had lower grades.

 

  1. The framework requires areas to supply information about SEND transport, and some reports do mention transport, for example in one area: “The current home-to-school transport policy is not widely understood by parents, carers and practitioners. Many parents are dissatisfied with the changes made to their child’s transport arrangements, usually without consultation or explanation.”

 

  1. However, the broad scope of inspections means that post-16 provision as a whole forms only part of reports, and transport a much smaller part, when mentioned at all. In any case inspections take place only every 3 to 5 years, so a student can pass through their entire college career between inspections. AoC has previously argued that existing local authority accountabilities should be supplemented, for example through the publication of performance metrics covering a range of issues impacting post-16 students including place commissioning.

 

Our recommendations

 

  1. Our recommendations are:

a)      The statutory duty for local authorities to provide transport for young people with SEND should be extended to be consistent with the way that college places are commissioned and funded, in other words till the age of 25.

b)      Supporting young people with and without SEND to develop skills requires investment not only in the skills sector itself but in the wider range of public services that support participation in education, such as public transport.

c)      A wider range of accountabilities should be introduced for local authority decision-making around all aspects of post-16 transitions, including the setting up of transport arrangements.

 

November 2025

 

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