Summary: We will not investigate Miss X’s complaint about the Council’s refusal to provide free school transport for her child. There is not enough evidence of fault by the Council to justify investigating.

The complaint

1. Miss X complains about the Council’s refusal to provide free school transport for her son, whom I shall call Y.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service but must use public money carefully. We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating.

(Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))

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How I considered this complaint

3. I considered information provided by Miss X and the Council.
4. I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

5. Miss X complains the Council refuses to provide school transport for Y, despite providing it for the previous two years.
6. Councils have a duty to provide free school transport to ‘eligible’ children. These include children attending the nearest suitable school to home and who live over the statutory walking distance; for children of secondary school age this is three miles. Statutory guidance on home to school transport states the nearest secondary school to a student’s home will almost always be their nearest suitable school.
7. In this case, Miss X and Y live just over a mile from school. This means there is no entitlement to free transport. The Council has considered Miss X’s case through its appeals process and decided not to uphold her appeal. It offered travel training for Y.
8. While I understand Miss X’s frustrations, we will not start an investigation.
9. The Ombudsman is not an appeal body. This means we do not take a second look at a decision to decide if it was wrong. Instead, we look at the processes an organisation followed to make its decision. If we consider it followed those processes correctly, we cannot question whether the decision was right or wrong, regardless of whether a complainant disagrees with the decision the organisation made.
10. Miss X says Y has no road awareness and that she is a single parent suffering from several mental health issues.
11. However, the information we have seen shows the Council has considered all the information provided. It also shows the Council followed the correct procedure in reviewing its original decision and holding an appeal panel which Miss X attended.
12. We could not therefore say the Council was at fault for refusing Miss X’s original application. It was a decision consistent with the law and the Council’s own policy. It previously provided transport as Y had not received travel training. This does not mean it must continue to provide transport as Y does not live more than three miles from school.

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Final decision

13. We will not investigate Miss X’s complaint because there is not enough evidence of fault in the way the Council decided to refuse her application for school transport.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman