Funding Extension Approved For Bristol Home To School Travel
Home to School Travel has come up in meetings at Bristol City Council regularly, most frequently as a source of contention at escalating costs.
It’s been the result of a lack of specialist places locally for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (Send).
The shortage of places has meant that children are often forced to travel many miles to reach an education setting that can meet their needs.
The costs of Home to School Travel cropped up in more than one agenda item during the Children and Young People Committee meeting last week.
It reared its head positively in the Finance Update Report agenda item.
Executive Director for Children and Education, Hannah Woodhouse said: “There is good news in the Revenue budget…”
“There’s also improvement against the Home to School Travel pressure which we had anticipated. And that’s partly because of the close work that we’ve been doing, including with the Parent Carer Forum. We haven’t seen those pressures materialise. So there is some good news in here.”
No questions were asked regarding HTST during the agenda item. The report was for noting.
Home to School Travel came up more extensively in agenda item – Extension of the Home to School Travel Dynamic Purchasing System. It required a ‘key decision’ to be made by the committee members.
The purpose to the report was for the following two points:
- To seek approval for the extension of the Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) contract used by the Home to School Travel Service to procure transport for children’s travel to and from school. The extension takes up the option of two sets of one year and would be until December 2028.
- To seek approval for a further £35M of spend to account for the increased demand within the
service and to extend the contract up to 31st December 2028.
The recommendation was also for two things:
- That the committee approves the increase in value of additional £35M, subject to approval of the budget envelope at full council in February 2026, enabling a maximum £45M of spend between 1st January 2026 and 31st December 2028.
- Authorises the Executive Director Children and Education in consultation with the Chair of the Children and Young People Committee to take all steps required to enact the contract extensions up to 31 December 2028 as set out in this report and subject to the increased budget envelope.
The report:
Director for Strategic Improvement and Collaboration, Heather Storey said: “So we have a DPS, a Dynamic Purchasing System in place which has been pretty successful. We’re quite happy with the providers on there and the way that they’re operating.
“You’ll be aware that we’ve made various changes in this area whilst the DPS has been in place and that hasn’t kind of held us back.
“The extension has the option for us to put in place two sets of one-year extensions. We’re hoping to invoke them both at the same time to use the DPS for a further two years until December 2028.
“Up to this point we’ve had allocated £14 million per financial year and we’ve used £10 million. So that leaves us with £10 million and therefore we’re asking for a further £35 needed to take us up to a total of £45 million.
“We’re not looking at a reduction in spend in the coming year’s budget and so the finance comments that you’ll see that finance colleagues are happy with this.
“So looking for endorsement to extend the DPS and the budget for that period please.”
Lib Dem Councillor for Brislington West, Andrew Varney said: “£35 million. I think that’s the biggest amount of money I’ve ever been asked to approve or not. Incredible feeling. It is a huge amount of money and I know that the service has been working really hard to to find alternatives. So for example having our own fleet of electric vehicles and using those vehicles for other purposes as well.
“Is there an opportunity to extend that so we have more in-house provision rather than relying on external providers that are obviously more expensive?
Heather Storey said: “Yeah, so you’ll know that we’ve had kind of phase one of the program for SEND travel and we’re entering phase two at the moment which seeks to kind of continue basically the good work that’s been going on already.
“The fleet is working really well. All of the vehicles that we’ve procured through phase one are in place now and being used. You’ll see that from the budget paper that you just saw that we actually returned an underspend in the last period which is pretty much unheard of in this area.
“So really good work is going on and we absolutely want to continue that.
“Just to kind of put alongside that the work that you’re aware of that’s going on in EHCPs and we’re looking at you know an increasing number of EHCPs coming, we will see growing demand in SEND travel aligned to that and so we have to just be aware of that when we’re planning our sufficiency basically.
“The dynamic purchasing system has no obligation to spend. So in extending that system we could not use it ever and if we didn’t need to then obviously we wouldn’t. But it means that we’ve got a legal route to market when we need to use that.”
Labour Councillor Kerry Bailes for Hartcliffe and Withywood said: “Just a comment really because obviously I use the the the service and how amazing they are. They’re just so brilliant. My son’s just been reintegrated back into school and at very short notice they have put arrangements in and just been absolutely amazing and I cannot fault them.”
Labour Councillor Katja Hornchen for Brislington East said: “There was just one related, it’s probably not related to this so much as the actual spend, but it was just related to the the questions we had at public forum. And it was about having a better system of showing who’s coming online. Because they do that with Uber, I think. I don’t know. I don’t use Uber much, but I used it once that tells you there’s a taxi driver and where he is.
“So, I was just wondering if that could be integrated better so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen so that they know on their phones because it seems nowadays with our modern technology, we should be able to do that.”
Heather Storey said: “Yeah. So we are looking at that and actually we’ve had I think quite good performance where we’ve known about typically driver and PA absence and where we know about that at least a day in advance we’re able to text families so that they are aware.
“The issues we’ve had is where we’ve had on the day sickness and it’s been really difficult to turn that around and we haven’t always been able to inform families quickly. And that has that has caused problems for children and upset them.
“Really that’s about improving our communication with providers and therefore with families as well. So, we’re working on that. We’ve got an active work stream with all of the providers on the DPS too. Yeah.”
Chair of Children and Young People Committee, Councillor Christine Townsend said: “We are asked as the committee for Children and Young People to one, approve the increase in value of additional £35 million subject to approval of the budget envelope at full council in February 2026 enabling the maximum £45 million of spend between 01 of January 2026 and the 31 of December 2028.
“And number two, authorise the Executive Director of Children and Education in consultation with the Chair of the Children and Young People’s Committee, to take all steps required to enact the contract extensions up to the 31 of December 2028 as set out in the report and subject to the increased budget envelope.”
The proposal was seconded by Councillor Katja Hornchen and unanimously agreed upon.
Christine Townsend added: “You said about the large sum of money, Andrew. So children’s education is the largest single area of funds that comes into the council and that’s the same for Bristol as for any other local authority. So we are dealing with huge sums of money there’s no doubt about that.
“It’s because it’s it’s universal. Education is universal and the best education we can give is every child using every hour and every minute they ever they can ever get with education.
“We want to positively have active engagement whereas I can’t think of another service maybe the bus service possibly, maybe the recycling service, but it’s quite a unique public service in that sense.
“Most other public services are about prevention and you don’t want your residents to use it. So you don’t want your residents going into hospital hopefully public health and good lifestyles and things will keep them out of the hospital sector those sorts of things. But with our area, certainly the education, it’s the exact opposite. You want every kid in all the time.”
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