Home-to-School Transport

Kevin McKenna Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Kevin McKenna (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. Massive congratulations to the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing the debate. This issue matters to so many people around the country.

My constituency is a coastal community, but also very rural in parts. Many of the issues raised by the hon. Member apply directly to Sittingbourne and Sheppey. A notable issue is the recent school allocations in the east of the island of Sheppey that sent people what on paper was a few miles, as the crow flies, but given that it is an island, there is an enormous body of water in the way, and as the Harty ferry from Harty island went many decades ago, it was never going to happen—unless the kids were really good at swimming. They are being sent on a more-than-two-hour journey by public transport, often on snarled-up roads, and we have terrible bus services, like so many rural areas.

However, I want to focus on the issues for children with special educational needs and disabilities and particularly those aged 16 and older. Kent county council has recently changed the criteria that allow people to opt for school transport to their education and has now made it all but impossible for people with special educational needs to secure transport. In fact, more than 50 families have written to me about this in just the last couple of months, since it was announced that the policy was being changed.

Some of the stories that I hear are heartbreaking. Anthony is one young lad. He is 17 years old and non-verbal. He is attending sixth form at the moment. Although he is mobile on his feet, he needs a lot of help with his day-to-day care: his toileting—the ability to toilet—but also his interaction with people if they are on public transport. In fact, he would always need to be chaperoned, which is not something that can now be afforded in this system. That puts him at risk and puts the public at risk as well. He is distraught—visibly so—and his mother is distraught at the fact that now he may be unable to access schools and complete his education. He is just one example of many. They have been through the appeals process, trying to get that overturned, and it is really opaque. When I have written to people at the county council to try to find out what the process is and what the criteria are for challenging these decisions—for Anthony and many other children in this situation—I am told that it is a case of exceptional circumstances only, but then they struggle to define what exceptional circumstances are. As we burrow through this, we find that in the end there is an absolute veto in terms of their local policies, which frankly, to my mind, just means that they can make it up as they see fit. There is no real guidance as to what is and is not possible.

Anthony is not the only one. One of my near neighbours in Sittingbourne is Mason. I went to see him. He is a young lad of 16 with cerebral palsy. He has a fantastic wheelchair. It is a big chunky piece of kit that he requires to get around on. He is having a great time in sixth form at the moment, but from September that is not going to happen, because although nominally some funding has been allocated to him, it is not enough to hire transport. More to the point, when his parents have gone round looking for available transport in the area and have phoned up all nine of the local cab companies in Sittingbourne, not one of them has an adapted vehicle. To the point made about how transport impacts parents and other members of the family, Mason’s father drives their adapted vehicle to work and so is unable to use it to take him to school. Mason’s mother does not drive and has to take their daughter to a different school and get to work herself. One of those two parents is now under pressure to give up work in order to protect Mason’s education, which is going to be vital. This is a lad who could absolutely thrive as an adult if he can get through the key stages.

We know a lot of people with SEND need to go through the later stages in education all the way up to 25 to give them the life skills and ability to interact with other people, and a degree of independence that means people like Mason and other children who are affected can get into work and employment, which we know is one of the Government’s key aims. In a constituency like mine, with particularly high levels of young people not earning or learning, the impact is felt ever further. There are other stories where people have gone through the appeals process. It is a very intrusive process pushed down on people where members of the extended family—uncles and aunts, near friends and quite distant members of the family—are all asked to give a reason why they cannot take the children to school. In one case, members of a family who live in Cornwall were asked to account for why they could not take the child to school, when, of course, my constituency is in Kent. Unless there is a rapid way of travelling, I do not think that is very likely. It is not very plausible and it just speaks to how the whole process is not coherent—and I am being very polite.

The hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), who is not here, as he often isn’t, came to Kent soon after the election to give his opinion and to tell the Reform administration what he thought should happen. He was very clear. He said it was an enormous waste to spend money on getting kids to school. In fact, he said:

“There are things called parents who for as long as modern times remember have had the aggravation of getting their kids to school.”

That is a very characteristic turn of phrase from him. This is the modern world, not the 1950s or the 1850s. Transport is very complicated and we have a very different relationship with people with disabilities. I think particularly of families in which both parents are working. It really feeds into everything that is happening in Kent under its Reform administration. The leader of the Reform council said that breakfast clubs are a disaster because parents should be feeding their children. The trouble is, when I spoke to the county council to try to get clarity about what the criteria are, it pushed it back on the national Government and said that there is no tight guidance.

In line with the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, who secured the debate, I ask the Minister what we can do nationally to ensure that local authorities deliver what we want as a national policy: getting people into education, work or training, and making sure that everyone has access to a full and vibrant life. Is there a way of updating the statutory guidance for local authorities to include funding for transport for young people who need post-16 SEND transport? We need to get that in black and white so that local authorities have to consider it and cannot flim-flam away in the way that Kent county council has. That is my main ask.

[Derek Twigg (in the Chair)]

I advise Members that if they refer to Members who are not here, they should have let them know beforehand.

SEND Provision: Kent

Kevin McKenna Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan (Folkestone and Hythe) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered SEND provision in Kent.

It is a privilege to serve under your chairship, Sir John. Many dedicated people are working to support children with special educational needs and disabilities in my constituency—in schools, doctors’ surgeries and social services, alongside many other professionals—but I am afraid to say that children in Folkestone and Hythe are being failed every day by the broken SEND system in Kent, which is presided over by Reform UK-run Kent county council. This is not an entirely negative speech, but I do need to start by describing what we are seeing on the ground every day, before I move on to the way forwards.

The reality in Kent is that, under Reform’s stewardship, the situation for SEND support has deteriorated to crisis point. My inbox is full of emails from desperate parents. This is not a bureaucratic failure alone: it is a moral failure. In 2025, children in Kent with SEND are still denied the basic dignity, respect and support that any civilised society should provide. The stories from my constituency are not just troubling; they are harrowing indictments of a local authority that has lost its moral compass.

Let us take the case of one boy who was diagnosed with autism and pathological demand avoidance. He is now in year 6 at a specialist SEND school. His parents, supported by professionals, identified the secondary school that could best meet his complex needs, but instead, Reform UK’s Kent county council named a different school, which itself had admitted that it could not meet his needs. To compound this, the education, health and care plan, which is meant to be a living document, mostly referred to his infant years. He is 11 now. Disgracefully, his future is being locked to outdated paperwork. When his parents challenged the decision at tribunal, KCC brazenly admitted that its sole reason for choosing an inappropriate school was money. Let us call that what it is: institutional neglect, sanctioned from the very top of the council.

KCC is gaming the tribunal system as a delaying tactic, to push back the date when it must pay for SEND children’s needs. KCC spends far more on SEND tribunals than any other local authority in this country, amounting to millions of pounds every year, despite losing almost all of them. That is a failure of leadership of epic proportions.

My team is inundated with accounts of heartbreak, of children’s needs dismissed and of families abandoned. Another local child with complex SEND has been on a sharply reduced timetable since February 2025. The school was forced by a lack of resources to push forward a plan at pace and in a fashion entirely unsuited to him. He was failed not by his teachers but by the absent leadership of the council.

A child in my constituency was for an entire year denied any placement, simply due to the delays in drawing up an EHCP, which were a direct result of council paralysis. A further example, which is perhaps the most shocking and saddening, is a family whose child has been driven to despair by the failed system and has voiced the wish not to go on living. That should horrify all of us, and it is happening under the council’s watch.

[Kevin McKenna (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Lab)]

I am grateful to serve under your chairship, Sir John. The stories that my hon. and learned Friend is recounting completely match those that I get in my inbox and hear in my surgeries—these stories are repeated across the county. My constituency has a higher than the national, regional and county average of people with learning disability needs, and we are just not getting the support we need.

I want to flag two things. The SEND team at the council is extremely unresponsive to parents and schools and, indeed, to me and my office—I am sure that is true for colleagues, too. There is also a pattern of schools saying they can care for a child but being turned down. That is happening over and over again, and people are being forced to travel many miles across the county in a way that is simply not possible for children with this level of need.

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

I remind the hon. Gentleman that interventions should be short—but I am a kind and generous Chairman.