Local authorities have submitted spending data on home to school transport for many years through the section 251 returns. The Department has not routinely collected information on how many children and young people receive transport, how they travel or why they are eligible.41 It acknowledged this limited its ability to understand the challenges and pressures in the system.42 In February 2025, the Department started to collect this data and told us that it received a 75% response rate to its 2025 voluntary data collection, equivalent to 115 local authorities. However, the dataset has several limitations and not all local authorities answered all questions.43