Elizabeth Wickes feels 'lucky' that her daughter Emily can go to a private school for autistic children, which the council pays £50,000 per year for her to attend
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.
To get there, Emily now travels 90 minutes a day – 45 minutes each way – 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 schools run by private providers. The current taxi bill is £1.8bn a year and projected to rise to £2.2bn in the next three years.
Bridget Phillipson , the Education Secretary, told The i Paper the costs are “extraordinary” and children are travelling considerable distances away from their friends, family and local community.
Bridget Phillipson said she wanted 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.
The Wickes family, who live in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, agree that a lack of local options is a significant problem.
“It’s a complex system, and it’s very expensive,” said Ms Wickes. “Since 2019 we’ve been told by Suffolk County [Council] 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 – Gretton School – had been 15 minutes away, they could have taken her there themselves, but the 32-mile journey is so long that it is not feasible alongside their jobs. Ms Wickes runs The Lifestyle Organiser, a home organising business, while her husband works as a civil servant in London.
But having schools closer to home is unlikely to eliminate the need for taxis completely, 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,” Ms Wickes said.
Read Next
square COUNCILS
Read More
“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 the family’s previous home in Clare, Suffolk, the school recommended that her parents apply to the council for an education, health and care plan (EHC), which would mean getting funding for specialist support.
After visiting many schools, they applied with a 6,000-word supporting statement and backing from medical professionals.
Mr and Ms Wickes loved a school that was 15 minutes away, rated as outstanding and catered for autistic children, but it would not accept Emily, who was seven at the time. The school said it catered for 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 was not right for Emily. In Essex, one school they considered went into special measures on the day of Mr Wickes’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,” he said.
They have 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.
The couple feel very lucky, but say the process has not been without its challenges.
When the family moved from Clare to Bury St Edmunds a few years ago, it shortened Emily’s travel time to school from an hour to 45 minutes, Emily could not attend for about a month because they could not find a taxi that 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 is an accident on the motorway to school, it can take as long as two hours for her to get to school.
Emily said her interactions with her taxi drivers had been “all positive experiences”. She said there had been instances where a pupil in the car became upset, but that “wasn’t their fault”.
On one occasion, Ms Wickes remembers a pupil in the car getting severly upset 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”.
Previously, that child had had a traumatic experience while being in a car with a taxi driver who refused to turn off the music and got angry when asked to do so. “You have some taxi drivers who do not understand children who are autistic or neurodiverse,” Ms Wickes 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 had not been perfect but she had 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 would appear to be the simplest option, but it would mean having to reapply for public funding.
Ms Wickes said: “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.”
