Who we are

We are Solihull Council’s Independent Travel Training Team. We work with individuals who are currently travelling to school on a Solihull Council provided taxi and teach them how to travel from home to school and return journey using public transport. This service is completely free of charge.

The process

First of all, we have a discussion with the school to discuss each student we have on our database. The school will let us know if they think the student is suitable to be travel trained. This is based on the student’s ability, maturity and behaviour.

Once a list of suitable students has been collated by the Transport team and a letter has been sent out to say students taxi’s are being reviewed, we will call each students parent/carer to introduce them to the travel training scheme. If the parent/carer decides that they would like the students to receive travel training, we will then arrange to meet the student in school to have a very informal discussion around travel training.

A travel trainer will then visit the home address to talk about the scheme and everything the team has to offer. There are many additional areas that we need to cover during travel training; stranger awareness, personal safety, road safety, who to ask for help in an emergency etc. If the meeting is successful and parent/carer wants to go ahead with travel training; all paperwork must be completed. After this meeting, a date will be set to begin travel training and the school and the Solihull Council transport team will be notified.

Travel training will commence every day; morning and afternoon. The trainer will closely support the student by walking side by side. When appropriate, support will gradually reduce throughout each session, to encourage the student to become more independent. Once the trainer feels that the student is ready to travel independently, an assessment will be carried out by another travel trainer for the entire route. If the student passes this assessment, a sign off meeting will be signed by parents/carer and then the student can be signed off as an independent traveller. The student may be entitled to a free bus pass, please speak to your travel trainer about this. During travel training, the student’s taxi space will be put on hold. This does not mean that the taxi is gone forever! If the student is not successful with travel training, they will be put back onto their taxi.

To apply for ITT for you or someone else, follow the link below to access our online application form and for any further questions, please contact the travel training team on; 0121 704 8069:

http://www.solihull.gov.uk/traveltraining