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. 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 that automates the matching of pupils to vehicles and journeys, taking into account 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, and saved 3.26 hours of combined pupil travel time each day. Daily transport costs for the school fell by £1,445.75 — a 33% reduction — and 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. Robert Sullivan, ESCC's Principal Transport Officer, said the tool showed "drastic improvements in efficiency."

The published figures are council- and vendor-reported operational metrics — mileage, hours and cost estimates — rather than an independent third-party evaluation, and represent early results from one pilot school ahead of wider rollout. There is no public data yet on pupil wellbeing outcomes, nor on how savings held up once the tool was applied county-wide.

Read the full analysis: https://www.localgov.co.uk/Council-forecasts-1m-savings-in-school-transport-using-online-planning-tool/51759