Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made an assessment of the potential impact of eligibility criteria for free school transport on young children who are advised to walk to school in Surrey Heath constituency.

The department’s home-to-school travel policy aims to make sure that no child is prevented from accessing education by a lack of transport. Local authorities must arrange free home-to-school travel for eligible children. A child is eligible if they are of compulsory school age, 5 to 16, attend their nearest school and would not be able to walk there because of the distance, their special educational needs, disability or mobility problem, or because the nature of the route means it would be unsafe for them to do so. There are extended rights to free travel for children from low-income families.

Local authorities also have a discretionary power to arrange travel for other children if they choose to do so.

Tackling school absence is at the heart of this government’s mission to break down the barriers to opportunity. Since September 2024, we have added a new absence code to school registers to reflect issues with local authority arranged transport. Only 0.011% of the total number of school sessions for the 2024/25 academic year were missed due to issues with transport normally provided by the local authority or school not being available.