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Travel assessment guidelines
Project Status: Current (September 2006 – March 2007)
Research and development work undertaken by NIACE (Nightingale 2004, 2006) has shown that there is a general lack of consistency in the provision of travel support for adult learners.
There are discrepancies in arrangements between different forms of provision, such as those,
 | attending full and part-time learning; |
| on LSC funded and non-funded courses; |
| in Adult and Community Learning Provision (including PCDL) and in colleges of FE; |
| who receive mobility related benefits and those who don’t. |
There are also discrepancies in the way providers in the same sector respond to travel issues: some do not fund travel and others fund most or all of it. Evidence from the NIACE work reported in ‘Getting there and back again’ (Nightingale 2006) indicated that, whilst most education providers lacked a systematic approach to making decisions about funding travel for learners not covered by legislation, social care providers were taking more pragmatic approaches.
With the onset of more disability legislation in the form of the Disability Equality Duty, it is vital that the different sectors where adults learn have a fair and non-discriminatory approach to assessing learners’ travel requirements.
NIACE aims to develop guidelines for the learning and skills sector, in particular local authority providers and Further Education College provision, regional LSCs and Connexions on the assessment of adult learners for travel support funding. We have been consulting with learners and with practitioners from adult learning settings, health and social care settings and learning disability partnership boards to identify example of good practice and problematic issues.
