Ombudsman rules council was wrong to be right, or possibly right to be wrong, about school transport

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has dismissed a complaint against Swindon Borough Council over its refusal to provide home to school transport for a teenager with special educational needs, known only as Z, for the 2025-26 academic year.

Z's mother, referred to as Mrs X, said the council's decision to offer a £513 personal travel budget instead of transport left her unable to get Z to their special secondary school, due to the needs of Z's sibling. Z's teacher raised concerns in September 2025 that the resulting anxiety and missed journeys had pushed attendance down to 65 per cent. The Ombudsman, ruling in June 2026, found no fault in how the council reached its decision, noting that the council is entitled to review transport eligibility annually, even if it previously judged the exact same circumstances to be exceptional.

It is understood the Ombudsman's role is strictly to check that a decision was reached correctly, not whether it was any good, a distinction the council will no doubt find very reassuring and Mrs X somewhat less so. The £513 figure, meanwhile, remains the subject of quiet admiration among council finance staff for its precision, calculated to the pound but apparently not to the taxi fare.

Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she didn't need an ombudsman to tell her a budget of £513 wouldn't get a child to school and back for a year, because Ron could have told you that for nothing and thrown in an opinion about the council for free. "In my day," she said, "if a child needed a lift, somebody's mum did it in a Cortina and nobody filled in a form."

Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the ruling had given him a new way of describing his firm's annual mileage allowance review, which resets every January regardless of whether anyone's circumstances, or indeed the price of diesel, have changed in the slightest. He said he found it inspiring that a decision could be entirely correct and entirely useless at the same time, a principle he said underpinned most of Tench Paper Solutions' strategy documents.

Mrs X has been told she may reapply for transport for the 2026-27 school year, by which point, the council presumably hopes, the distance to school will have either changed or stopped mattering.