Council Funded School Transportation by Taxi

For each of the tax years 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2024/5 (actuals for prior years and forecast for current year), please provide the following information for council funded school transportation by taxi service for children and young people.

1. Total number of children whom the council funded school transportation taxi services – breakdown by both SEN and non-SEN taxi transport for each period

Figures provided are at a snapshot in time and change throughout the financial/academic year.  Each of the figures within the table above have been taken from the month of May within the relevant years.

2. Total spend on taxi services for child transportation – breakdown by both SEN and non-SEN taxi transport for each period.

Compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. As our costs are per route and not per passenger, we would have to break down the different types of routes and the needs of the passengers (SEN or Mainstream) as some routes are shared where as others are specifically SEN or Mainstream. For the year 2022/23 alone, we would have to check 1149 with SEN and 1027 without SEN to see if they have used taxi services which at a minute a time is 2176 minutes and over 18 hours of officer time.

In the interests of providing advice and assistance, the Council can provide the following information on the total costs spent on SEN and non SEN transport:

3. Names of all taxi supplier(s) used to provide this service and volume of work provided to each – breakdown by both SEN and non-SEN taxi transport for each period.

Compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. We have over 400 approved operators who provide transport and to check the volume of work provided to each, broken down by SEN and non SEN, we would estimate would take 5 minutes which is 2000 minutes and 33 hours.

Under the Act, there is a duty to provide advice and assistance as to how a request can be refined to fit within the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the way the data is held, this is not possible for this request. 

4. Since when have you used with these suppliers for this purpose?

Due to contract changes, we are not able to establish when each operator first started work for Devon County Council (DCC) for Education Transport purposes. Furthermore, contracts regularly change depending on service need.

5. If you have contracts in place with these suppliers when do they expire?

We regularly review transport networks to ensure what we have in place are meeting the required service need whilst maintaining best value. We issue rolling contracts until either party gives notice.

6. If you publish the terms of these contracts, please share a website link.

We do not publish the terms of these contracts on our website but they can be viewed on Pro-Contracts once a contractor has logged into their account. These are also now issued to operators once they have been approved by DCC to provide work for Transport Co-ordination Service purposes.

7. In addition to the transportation of children to and from school what are they key requirements you have of these suppliers (e.g. safeguarding, reporting, integration with systems etc.)

All operators/ their drivers and passenger escorts, must have been issued with a DCC badge which will not be issued until on line training models (Data Protection, Equality and Diversity, Safeguarding for Drivers, First Aid Awareness, Behaviour Management Awareness, Manual Handling, Equality and Diversity, Data Protection for passenger escorts) have been successfully completed and an enhanced DBS check has taken place.  This is reviewed every 3 years or sooner if required.

They must abide by regulations within the driver and escort handbook as well as those set out in the Terms and Conditions of contract. We have an online Behaviour and incident reporting system that operators must use (or submit the details and the form via email) as well as an online reporting system for when routes are not running (Route Closures Archive – Schools Information).

8. If you used a tendering document, please share.

Tenders are submitted using both the Pro-Contracts system as well as email tenders.  Email tenders are sent with varying cover emails depending on what is being tendered for and the additional information that may be required for operators to consider when submitted their bids.

Please see an example of an email tender at the following link Email Tender Template.