QRoutes AI Route Optimisation — East Sussex Cuts SEND Transport Costs and Planning Time

East Sussex County Council (ESCC) is responsible for arranging home-to-school transport for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) across the county, and before 2019 transport planners manually calculated routes using Google Maps, a process that could take six to seven hours to plan transport for a single SEND school and left no time to test alternative routing scenarios.

In July 2019, having re-tendered its transport contract, ESCC adopted QRoutes, a route-optimisation platform intended to automate the matching of pupils to vehicles and journeys while accounting for medical needs, journey-time limits capped at 75 minutes, and vehicle capacity.

The council piloted the tool on Torfield School, a two-site SEND school in Hastings serving Reception to Year 6, after consulting pupil groups about sharing larger vehicles with a higher staff-to-pupil ratio.

At Torfield, replanning cut the number of routes from 21 to 15, removed roughly 115-116 miles of daily passenger travel, saved 3.26 hours of combined pupil travel time each day, and cut daily transport costs for the school by £1,445.75, a 33% reduction; ESCC forecast total annual savings exceeding £1 million across its SEND and mainstream school transport budgets, alongside a fall in planning time from hours to minutes per school route.

The published figures are council- and vendor-reported operational metrics rather than an independent third-party evaluation, and represent early results from one pilot school ahead of wider rollout, with no public data yet on pupil wellbeing outcomes or on how savings held up once the tool was applied county-wide.