My autistic child spends 1.5 hours a day in taxis

When their daughter Emily started struggling in school, Elizabeth and Matthew Wickes were advised to look for a special school that could cater to her needs.

Finding a good school in Suffolk that could help Emily, who has autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia, proved impossible.

They ended up applying for funding from the council, which paid for her to attend a private school for autistic children in Cambridge. The fees are around £50,000 a year.

Emily now travels 90 minutes a day, or 45 minutes each way, to get to school, in a taxi funded by the council.

The 14-year-old is among children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) who travel far from home to special specials run by private providers. The current taxi bill is £1.8bn a year and is projected to rise to £2.2bn in the next three years.

The Education Secretary told The i Paper the costs are “extraordinary” and left children traveling considerable distances away from their friends, family and local community.

Bridget Phillipson said she wants more children with SEND to attend mainstream schools to cut down on costs. She hinted that private providers face profit-limiting controls and that more funding for state-run provision may be needed closer to home.

Elizabeth, 48, and Matthew, 52, agree that a lack of local options is a significant problem.

“It’s a complex system, and it’s very expensive,” said Elizabeth. “Since 2019 we’ve been told by Suffolk County that they want to build more schools, and yet they haven’t.

“They’re failing SEND children in this local authority, and unfortunately, it is taxpayers who are having to pick up that tab and send these children and pay for taxis.

“We feel very privileged to have the taxi paid for and for Emily to go to a specialist school, but the lack of SEND services is shocking considering the demand on these services locally within the area.”

If their daughter’s school had been 15 minutes away, they could have taken her there themselves, but the journey is so long that it is not feasible alongside their jobs. Elizabeth runs The Lifestyle Organiser, a home organising business, while Matthew works as a civil servant in London.

But having schools closer to home is unlikely to completely eliminate the need for taxis because some children with SEND need to travel alone and have complex needs, she said.

The fees for schools like Emily’s are huge, but they provide a lot of support. “These schools charge a lot of money because they need the staff, they need the experts, they need people who are specially trained,” Elizabeth said.

“We’re one of the lucky ones. I feel so badly for the parents who desperately need a place and who are not getting it.”

Emily’s class has one teacher and two teaching assistants, with only seven other pupils in it.

When she was struggling in her mainstream school close to their home in Clare, the school recommended that her parents apply to the council for an education, health and care plan, which would mean getting funding for specialist support.

After visiting many schools, they applied with a 6,000 word supporting statement and support from medical professionals.

Elizabeth and Matthew loved a school that was 15 minutes away, rated as outstanding and catered to autistic children, but they would not accept Emily, who was seven at the time. The school said they catered to those who could read and write at Emily’s age, but she was struggling to write.

Another school in the county was geared towards autistic children with severe learning difficulties such as being non-verbal, which wasn’t right for Emily either. In Essex, a school they considered went into special measures on the day of Matthew’s visit.

“In terms of more mainstream education, if you’re in a very busy town, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got a choice, whereas if you look at the SEND provision, there is absolutely no choice whatsoever,” said Matthew, who works as a civil servant.

They’ve met other parents with “horror stories” of trying to get funding for their children to attend special schools and being rejected by their local authorities.

Elizabeth and Matthew feel very lucky, but the process hasn’t been without its challenges.

When the family moved from Clare to Bury St Edmunds a few years ago, which shortened Emily’s travel time to school from an hour to 45 minutes, Emily was off school for about a month because they could not find a taxi who could take her.

She was initially placed in a taxi with another Gretton pupil, only to be told that they had made a mistake and the student needed to ride alone.

If there’s an accident on the motorway to school, it can take as long as two hours for Emily to get there.

Emily said she has had “all positive experiences” with her taxi drivers. She said there have been instances where a pupil in the car got upset, but that “wasn’t their fault”.

On one occasion, Elizabeth remembers a pupil in the car having a meltdown on the motorway. It led to the taxi company refusing to take that child to school because they were “so violent in the taxi that it was unsafe”.

The child who had the meltdown had previously had a traumatic experience of being in a car with a taxi driver who refused to turn off the music in the car and got angry when asked to do so.

“You have some taxi drivers who do not understand children who are autistic or neurodiverse,” Elizabeth said. “This child was smacked in the face and assaulted and pinned to the floor and threatened with assault by this taxi driver. It is a really complex situation for the local authority.

“It’s not straightforward. You can’t just put all these kids in a mini-bus or a taxi.”

Emily said attending Gretton has not been perfect but she has grown “really comfortable” there. “I’ve got teachers that help me, and I’ve got really good friends,” she said.

But she added: “Sometimes I do wish that I lived close to my friends.”

Moving to Cambridge sounds like the simplest option, but it would mean having to reapply for public funding.

“We cannot move from Suffolk, because otherwise we would have to go through the whole stressful rigmarole of having to reapply different county, and that county could reject us,” Elizabeth said.