A bus with a wheelchair lift. Image: Steve Morgan (CC BY-SA 3.0). For several years, our son Tom travelled to and from his special needs school without incident in a minibus run by an outsourced company commissioned and paid by the County Council. One of the four students in the minibus had challenging behaviour, but he was young and still quite small, and the escort was able to manage his behaviour.
However, as this younger child grew bigger his challenging behaviour became more difficult to manage. Neither the driver nor the escort had any training at all in behaviour management. One driver had already quit the route because of this student’s behaviour.
One day in June, the student, let’s call him Barry, hit Tom in the stomach. Barry was not acting intentionally; his behaviour was related to his learning disability. It is likely that his challenging behaviour was exacerbated by going to school in a minibus – he should have had the calmness and predictability of lone transport. As Tom has Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), the consequences of the assault could have been very serious, even fatal. We reported the incident to the local authority Special Educational Needs Officer and asked for the authority to provide lone transport for Tom, on the grounds of physical vulnerability caused by his DMD.
