SEND home-to-school transport, solved properly
The right journey for every child.
PupilRoute helps local authority transport teams assess eligibility, plan safe road-network routes, assign vehicles and track cost, while treating every child’s needs as hard constraints. Fewer, fuller vehicles. Clear cost per child. A complete audit trail.
A large, fast-rising statutory duty that spreadsheets handle badly.
SEND home-to-school transport cost English councils over £2.3 billion in 2023 to 24, up around 70 percent in eight years. Teams are under acute budget pressure and high scrutiny, while eligibility rules are complex and inconsistently applied, and routing children safely around their individual needs is hard to do well in spreadsheets.
How it works
From eligibility to audit, in one place.
Assess eligibility
Statutory walking-distance by age, safe-route and SEND overrides, with the reason recorded for every decision.
Plan safe routes
Multi-occupancy runs that follow the real road network and respect journey-time limits.
Honour every need
Solo travel, wheelchair, harness, assistant and max journey time are hard constraints, never broken.
Assign and cost
Match runs to capable vehicles and operators, and see cost per route and per child.
Audit and export
A complete audit trail, least-privilege roles, and spend reports exported to Excel and PDF.
Built for the SEND transport problem, not generic logistics.
Explainable eligibility engine
Consistent, statutory decisions with the criteria and reason recorded for every child.
Needs as hard constraints
No route ever ignores a child's recorded need. This is a safeguarding gate, not a preference.
Road-aware routing
Efficient multi-occupancy runs snapped to the real road network.
Cost and spend analysis
Per-route and per-child cost, with reports by school, student or route across daily, termly and yearly periods.
Audit and least-privilege roles
Every decision and action recorded; each role sees only what it should.
Excel and PDF exports
Council-branded spend reports, ready for finance and scrutiny.
Inside PupilRoute
See the whole catchment at a glance.
An interactive satellite map shows schools, pupil homes coloured by eligibility, and optimised routes that follow real roads. Zoom across catchment areas, re-optimise, and switch cost basis in a click.
Routes
Optimised runs, every need honoured.
Multi-occupancy runs follow the real road network. Solo travel, wheelchair access, travel harness, passenger assistant and maximum journey time are treated as hard constraints, never broken, and each run is matched to a capable vehicle.
Budget
Cost that stands up to scrutiny.
Per-route and per-child cost, broken down by school, student or route across daily, termly and yearly periods. Export council-branded spend reports to Excel and PDF, ready for finance and audit.
What good looks like.
Fewer, fuller vehicles
Better fleet fill rate, lower cost.
Defensible decisions
Consistent, explainable eligibility that stands up to scrutiny.
Clear cost per child
Budget visibility by school, route and pupil.
Time back
Less spreadsheet wrangling for officers.
Security and data
Safeguarding and data protection, built in.
PupilRoute handles sensitive data about vulnerable children, so access control, audit and data minimisation are treated as acceptance gates, not features to add later.
Pricing
Start with a pilot.
Annual SaaS licence per authority, scaled by pupil volume, with a routing-optimisation module. Begin with a paid pilot on your own data. Not a self-serve checkout; this is a conversation.
Run PupilRoute on your own catchment, with support, and see cost per child before you commit.
- Your data, synthetic in demos
- Routing-optimisation module
- Spend reports for finance and scrutiny