Schools: Transport
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made an assessment of the potential impact of pupils transferring from private to state schools on the cost to local authorities of home school transport.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell
Local authorities are required to arrange free home-to-school travel for children of compulsory school age who attend their nearest school and would be unable to walk there because of the distance, their special educational needs, disability or mobility problem, or because the route is unsafe. As such, most pupils do not need home-to-school transport.
Departmental officials work closely with local authorities in relation to home-to-school transport and will continue to engage on this. As set out in HMT’s impact assessment, we expect the level of movement from private to state-funded schools following tax changes to be very small. We have not seen any evidence to contradict our expectations.
Most central government funding for home-to-school travel is provided through the Local Government Finance Settlement (LGFS) administered by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government. The provisional LGFS makes £69 billion available to local authorities in the 2025/2026 financial year, the majority of which is not ringfenced. Together with local income from council tax and business rates, this will provide a real-terms increase in core spending power of around 3.2%.
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