Summary: The Council was at fault in how it dealt with Mrs X’s application for free school transport. This caused Mrs X avoidable frustration but did not mean she missed out on Council funded school transport. The Council will apologise to Mrs X.

The complaint

1. Mrs X complained the Council failed to give her a refund for the transport costs she incurred taking her son, W, to and from school, after it upheld her school transport appeal. Mrs X also said the Council took too long to carry out the appeal and delayed arranging travel for the 2025/2026 school year.
2. Mrs X said this caused her frustration, had a financial impact and meant she had to go to avoidable effort.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

3. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. In this statement, I have used the word fault to refer to these. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint. I refer to this as ‘injustice’. If there has been fault which has caused significant injustice, or that could cause injustice to others in the future we may suggest a remedy. (Local Government Act 1974, sections 26(1) and 26A(1), as amended)
4. When considering complaints we make findings based on the balance of probabilities. This means that we look at the available relevant evidence and decide what was more likely to have happened.
5. If we are satisfied with an organisation’s actions or proposed actions, we can complete our investigation and issue a decision statement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 30(1B) and 34H(1), as amended)
6. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))

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How I considered this complaint

7. I considered evidence provided by Mrs X and the Council as well as relevant law, policy and guidance.
8. Mrs X and the Council had an opportunity to comment on my draft decision. I considered any comments before making a final decision.

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What I found

Relevant law and guidance

School admissions

9. Under the system of coordinated admissions, parents make a single application for a school place to their home council. This is the council the parent pays their council tax to. The parent is able to list several schools as their preference.
10. Schools must have a set of admission arrangements containing oversubscription criteria. The school’s admission authority uses these to decide which children will receive an offer of a place if there are more applications than places available. Children are given a ranked position according to those criteria.
11. A school’s admission arrangements must also contain a Published Admission Number (PAN). This is the number of places the school will offer at each point of entry. The point of entry is when the school normally admits children. This is usually at the point a child enters reception, junior or secondary school or when they enter first, middle or secondary school.
12. Applications made for children to begin attending school or to move to a new school at the point of entry are called normal admission round applications. The normal admission round begins in the September the year before a child will begin school or move to a new school and ends on the date that offers of places are issued in the academic year before admission or transfer.
13. If a child wants to move to a new school outside the normal admissions round, the parent must make a mid-year application. In those cases, the parent applies to the school they want, they do not list preferences as in the normal admissions round.

School transport

14. Local authorities must make suitable home to school travel arrangements as they consider necessary for ‘eligible children’ of compulsory school age to attend their ‘qualifying school’. A child is eligible is they are attending their nearest suitable school and that school is over three miles away (for secondary schools). The travel arrangements must be made and provided free of charge. The relevant qualifying school is the nearest school with places available that provides education appropriate to the age, ability and aptitude of the child.
15. Councils should have an appeals process in place for parents who wish to appeal about the eligibility of their child for travel support. The Council’s appeal process is set out in its policy, “Mainstream home to school/college transport policy for the 2024/2025 academic year”. It says it aims to meet the timescales below, but if a parent asks for an appeal late, it may not be able to do so.

• Parents have 20 working days to ask for an appeal.
• The Council will issue a stage one response within 20 working days.
• If the parent asks for a stage two appeal, the Council will hold the independent panel hearing within 40 working days of the request.
• The Council will issue its decision on the stage two appeal within 10 working days.

The Council’s school transport policy

16. The Council’s policy sets out that if a parent wants to apply for free school transport as part of the normal admissions round, they must include their nearest school as one of their preferences when applying for a school space.
17. This is because, when considering school transport applications for the normal admissions round, the Council uses school admissions data for that year. It considers whether the child got a space at their nearest school. If they did not, the Council considers if the parent applied to the nearest school and if they did, whether that school could have given the child a space. If the parent did not apply to the child’s nearest school, the Council will refuse the application for transport.
18. To decide if a child’s nearest school had space, the Council assumes that, during the normal admissions round, the year group in question is normally empty. It considers the school’s PAN and if the school had fewer applications than its PAN, the Council concludes the child could have attended the school. If the school had more applications than its PAN, the Council considers where the child was ranked. If they were ranked high enough to have been offered a space, the Council does not award transport. If the child ranked too low to have been offered a space, the Council considers whether the next nearest school could have admitted the child, providing the parent applied to it. If the child was awarded a space at the next nearest school, the Council will agree to arrange free school transport.
19. Statutory guidance “Home-to-school travel” says it is reasonable for councils to expect parents to list their nearest school on their application form if they intend to apply for transport. This is because it can be difficult for a council to know whether a child could have been admitted to their nearest school if their parent did not list that school as a preference when they applied for a school place.

What happened

20. In 2021, when W was ready to go into year 7, Mrs X applied for secondary school spaces. Mrs X applied to three schools and W was offered a space at school A. The other two schools were closer to W’s home but did not have space to admit him. As a result, and in accordance with its policy, the Council arranged free school transport for W to get to school A.
21. In advance of W starting year 10 in September 2024, Mrs X successfully applied for W to transfer to another school, school B which is nearer to their home but still over three miles away. School B had previously only taught children from year 10 to 13 but from the beginning of the 2022/2023 school year, it began teaching children from year 7. This meant that from that school year and up to and including the 2024/2025 school year, it took applications, during the normal admissions round, for an entirely new cohort of students ready to start year 10. School B was the last school in the Council’s area to make that change, so it was the only school which was accepting applications for year 10 as part of the normal admissions round.
22. Mrs X applied for school transport but it was refused on the basis that there was one other school which was nearer, school C, which Mrs X had not applied to. Mrs X began paying for W’s transport to school B, from the start of the school year.
23. Following a complaint from Mrs X, the Council further explained its decision. It said Mrs X could have applied to school C as a mid-year application. If she had done that, and school C was full, then the Council would have awarded free school transport to school B.
24. Mrs X appealed the Council’s decision late, in mid-January 2025, but the Council accepted it nonetheless. The Council issued its stage one appeal response in late February. It concluded W was not eligible for free school transport because school B was not his nearest school. Mrs X asked for a stage two appeal in early March.
25. The Council’s school transport appeal panel met in early May 2025. As part of that hearing, the Council said:
• Parents must include their nearest school when applying for school places, in order to be considered for free school transport. Mrs X did not do this;
• But, it accepted Mrs X could not have applied to school C at the same time as school B; and
• In making its decision on free school transport it had considered which school was closest to Mrs X’s home. It said it had also concluded it was likely school C would have space for W in September 2024 because students would transfer from school C to school B ready for year 10.
26. Records show the panel decided there were exceptional circumstances to justify it awarding W free school transport. This was because school B was the only school accepting students to entry in year 10 and for Mrs X to have applied to school C, she would have had to make a mid-year application.
27. Mrs X told the Council she wanted a refund for the cost of W’s school transport from the start of the 2024/2025 school year. The Council decided it would give Mrs X a refund from the start of the summer term in 2025, because that was the term in which the panel upheld her appeal.
28. In response to my enquiries, the Council has confirmed school C had spaces available for the 2024/2025 school year.
29. In late June, the Council told Mrs X how she could apply for a free bus pass for W to use to get to school.

Findings

The decision to refuse Mrs X’s application

30. The panel concluded W should have free school transport because there were exceptional circumstances which, in its view, justified awarding transport. However, the panel was at fault in how it considered Mrs X’s appeal. This was because the panel failed to identify that:
• The Council had acted contrary to its policy when it refused Mrs X’s application. The Council said it would not give W transport because Mrs X did not apply to school C. Mrs X’s application to school B was part of the normal admissions round. The Council’s policy says if parents want to be considered for free school transport during the normal admissions round they must include their nearest school as one of their preferences. However, as the panel itself recognised, it was not possible for Mrs X to apply to school C as the school was not participating in the normal admissions round for children going into year 10. The Council was wrong to have refused Mrs X’s transport application on the basis that she should have made a concurrent mid-year application to school C.
• The Council’s decision to assume school C had space was flawed. W was joining an existing school year and while the Council felt there would be space because some students would transfer from it to school B, this was not a certainty. It was possible that the existing year was full and so W could not have attended it even if Mrs X had been able to apply to it.
31. Therefore, the panel should have concluded that the Council had not made its initial decision correctly. Mrs X feels the Council should reimburse her for the cost of W’s transport from the start of the school term. This would be appropriate if I could say that, had the Council made its decision properly, it would have agreed W needed free school transport.
32. When the Council received Mrs X’s application, it should have recognised she could not have applied to school C as part of the normal admissions round and that, as a result it would not be able to use school admissions data to confirm if school C had space for W. It would have sought that information itself and would have found that there was space. The duty to arrange free school transport only applies when a child’s nearest suitable school does not have space to admit them. Given school C had space, it is likely the Council would have decided W was not eligible for free school transport. Given this, there is no basis for me to recommend the Council reimburse Mrs X the money she spent on W’s transport between the start of the 2024/2025 school year and the appeal. The fault nonetheless caused Mrs X avoidable frustration, for which the Council should apologise.

Appeal timescale

33. The stage one response to Mrs X’s appeal was 12 working days late. The appeal panel met within timescale and the Council was two working days late in issuing the appeal outcome. The Council’s policy says it may take longer than the timescales where the applicant made their appeal late, as Mrs X did. Taking this into account, the delay of 14 working days total does not amount to fault.

2025/2026 school transport arrangements

34. I have not investigated Mrs X’s complaint about how the Council arranged W’s school transport ready for the start of the 2025/2026 school year because any fault did not cause her a significant personal injustice. This is because the Council issued W’s bus pass in June 2025, several months before the start of the school year.

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Action

35. Within one month of the date of my final decision, the Council will apologise to Mrs X for the frustration she felt as a result of the flaws in its initial decision to refuse school transport, and in the panel’s consideration of her appeal. We publish guidance on remedies which sets out our expectations for how organisations should apologise effectively to remedy injustice. The Council should consider this guidance in making the apology.
36. The Council will provide us with evidence it has complied with the above actions.

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Decision

37. I find fault causing injustice. The Council has agreed to remedy that injustice.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman