‘We feel sad and let down by our council’-SEND Parents look to get legal action.

Our message to parents: know your rights: you do not have to accept travel training or personal transport budgets, and you can always reach out if you need any support.

Ruth Kettle-Frisby has been campaigning for SEND children and their right to free school travel. Today she writes in the Havering Daily.

The essence of the ‘policy update’ on Home to School Travel for disabled children in Havering is not that of a “flexible”, “bespoke service”; it is simply about delivering a statutory service as cheaply as they can get away with. 

 The wasted energy SEND parents invested in trying to foster meaningful dialogue with the council points to a worrying phenomenon: the council work for us, and yet all they did throughout was tell us what they are doing; the only thing that changed was the wording at one stage after I called out the potential for harm to our children that was implicit in the original motion.

 It went through via a ‘consultation process’ that collected views that were heavily filtered through their own agenda; there was nothing parents could say or do to be heard in any meaningful sense.  The council disregarded protesting parents and carers as little more than a small-scale nuisance, patronising us and underestimating our ability to understand how the policy would impact us. They failed to contact every school they were supposed to, and they cherry picked a single example of how life-changing ‘Travel Training’ can be to suit their agenda.

 We have made it clear throughout that their euphemisms for cost-saving measures like ‘travel training’ (an inherently ableist concept) and personal budgets (which cost parents in money, time and energy, and compromise the safety of our children where we work full time and don’t drive) such as “flexibility” are not what we want: we want and need robust, safeguarded, joined up systems we can trust.

During the time of the consultation, it also came to light that Havering’s Children Services were failing the most vulnerable children and their carers. I have learned that service and true accountability to our residents – especially to our most vulnerable – plays second fiddle to ableist government-led guidance to ‘deliver better value’. This is true for both Labour and HRA members, the former of whom had the audacity to berate central government (at length) for underfunding local authorities, to justify voting for a policy that follows ableist central government guidance.

We feel sad and let down by our local leaders, who some of us genuinely hoped would take us seriously for the sake of protecting some of the most oppressed people in the borough. Our children are powerless, and us parents and carers were listened to during the entire process only if we raised the council’s own pre-formed agenda up; an agenda that has not taken into account our reality, or the extent to the negative impact that will ripple outwards from the policy. 

Our message to parents: know your rights: you do not have to accept travel training or personal transport budgets, and you can always reach out if you need any support.

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