What would you sacrifice for your child to get to school?

Anonymous

I’ve been running through the numbers again. Not for a budget meeting or a funding bid – just in my head, at night, the way parents do when they’re scared.

I’ve been reflecting on what changes to policies for children with additional learning needs might mean for me, for example if there was no longer transport for my son to get to school, I would have to quit my job. That’s the bottom line.

My son has autism and attends a specialist setting within a mainstream school. He needs a taxi driver and a second person in the vehicle just to ensure he stays safely in the car. That’s not a luxury. That’s the minimum required for him to reach his classroom. If I had to provide that myself, driving him there and back each day, I couldn’t work as it could take up to three hours a day.

I have been crunching numbers, surviving on one wage would be very challenging, maybe impossible with fuel costs rising. These are the actual options I have been turning over in my mind.

I want to pause on that for a moment. A mother abandoning her career. The only solution available to an ordinary family trying to give a disabled child an education.

I shouldn’t be thinking about this at all. And yet here we are.

I live in Wales, and the Senedd election is days away. The polls show Reform UK and Plaid Cymru in a near dead heat, with the prospect of Reform becoming the largest party in the Welsh Parliament genuinely on the table. For parents like me — parents of children with special educational needs — this is not an abstract political question. We have already seen what a Reform-run council looks like in practice.

In Kent, following Reform UK’s electoral win in May 2025, the new administration launched a sweeping programme of cuts and reviews. SEND transport has become one of the most financially pressured services, with the council’s Home to School Transport budget under intense scrutiny. Families there are already facing what I fear. And those cuts come with a philosophical underpinning that I find deeply disturbing.

‘Hijacked’

Richard Tice, Deputy Leader of Reform, told the BBC that England’s special educational needs system has been “hijacked by parents,” implying families are gaming the rules to obtain provision for children who “don’t really need it.” He also suggested that some parents are using and abusing free taxis to school for children with special educational needs.

I would like Richard Tice to spend one morning with my son. I would like him to explain, to me, that my family is taking advantage. That I am somehow profiting from the exhausting, grinding, years-long process of securing basic support for a child who deserves to learn.

The National Autistic Society put it plainly: parents aren’t profiting from the education system — they are spending time and money fighting against a broken SEND system, just to get the most basic support at school. That is my experience exactly. Every piece of provision we have was fought for. None of it was handed to us.

What Tice’s comments do – what this entire political framing does – is redirect our anger. Instead of asking why public services are so underfunded that councils are considering whether to transport disabled children to school, we are encouraged to look sideways, at each other. At the parent who asked for too much. At the child who doesn’t really need those ear defenders. At families like mine.

I refuse that framing.

Choices

The truth is simpler and harder. Wealth has been hoarded. Public services have been stripped back. Working-class communities like the one I grew up in have been systematically left behind.

This is not accidental – it is a consequence of choices made over decades that served those with power, choices that depend on the rest of us blaming one another rather than asking who benefits.

It should not be ordinary people who are forced to make these sacrifices. It should not be my career on the line because a council needs to balance its books. If you are on benefits, if you have a child who needs additional support, the direction of travel under this political vision is clear: your life will get harder, and you will be told it is your own fault, or someone else’s like you.

My son did not choose to have autism. I did not choose to need support systems that apparently make some politicians uncomfortable.

What I am choosing, right now, is to say clearly: the people who will pay the price for these politics are not the powerful. They never are. They are families like mine, counting the cost in sleepless nights and impossible calculations.

Wales is about to make a choice. I know what’s at stake for us.