Chesterfield mum annoyed as daughter with special needs can't get on school bus due to council delays

Natalie Brannigan and her partner Steven, of Chesterfield, have been forced to drive their daughter Violet to a specialist school in Alfreton every day, due to delays with the paperwork by Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Service (SEND) at the Derbyshire County Council.

Violet, aged 4, and her older brother Reggie, 6, both have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) in place.

A bus, provided by the council, comes to Natalie’s house in Chesterfield every morning and takes Reggie to the school and drops him off in the afternoon – but his sister, who has been allocated a seat on the bus cannot go to school with him due to a delay in paperwork.

Natalie, a mum of three, said: “It is annoying and ridiculous. The bus already comes to my house and there's an empty seat allocated for Violet. But we can't put her on it just because the council won't pull their finger out and click a button to send the documents across. The bus company is being paid for picking her up, even though they're not taking her. And have to pay to take her to school and back.

"I've emailed the SEND office at the County Council numerous times, asking them to send the documents or reimburse us for fuel. And they just kept ignoring me. They didn’t answer me for several weeks and now they are saying they lost the documents. And there's no phone number to ring the SEND office directly.

"It's not the first time we have problems problems with the SEND officer at the Derbyshire County Council. We had our son out of school for a year, due to a mess up in the SEND office, and we had to take them to a tribunal for an EHCP. More problems followed when it turned out Violet needed EHCP as well. We waited 20 months for her EHCP when we should have waited 20 weeks. It's just it's an absolute mess. And it’s not just us, it’s hundreds of children affected by the delays.”

A spokesperson for Derbyshire County Council said: “We’re very sorry for the delays in progressing school transport applications and we hope to have this resolved very quickly. Our team is doing everything it can to get through applications and resolve outstanding applications as soon as possible

“We appreciate children’s transport arrangements are a very important part of school life to get in place and we are doing everything we can to keep any delays to a minimum.”