Debate on the bus goes round and round

The Simpsons regularly features Otto the school bus driver – a staple part of the local community. Admittedly he is a zoned-out hippy but he illustrates a part of childrens’ life in the States about which nobody thinks twice: taking a bus to and from school with other children. The UK equivalent of such a familiar routine is that of sitting in rush-hour traffic on clogged roads between 8-9am, 20% of which is composed of school run vehicles. See the Sutton Trust’s proposal, No More School Run.

The original reason for a network of school buses in their recognisable yellow in the States was that distances often being so vast, it is unrealistic to expect children to walk or cycle into school. In the UK this is generally less of a problem and we have a wide public transport system – so why bother to copy the US?

The answer is that there is a plethora of further advantages. It provides a guarantee that your child actually reaches school every morning; their journey will be safe; the driver is guaranteed to be CRB-checked and a regular face for those on board; the buses provided are far cheaper to use than regular public transport (and are often free); the child arrives at school in a relaxed state of mind, helping them to be ready to sit down and start the school day, and the environmental benefit of having fewer school run cars clogging up the roads is self-evident.

On Monday 28 April, about thirty invitees with jobs relating to the transport industry, education and local/district councils gathered in London’s Offices of the Confederation of Passenger Transport for a seminar chaired by David Blunkett and three members of his Yellow School Bus (YSB) Commission team. The idea was to pool everyone’s distinct expertise to discuss the pros and cons of developing a nationwide YSB system in the UK, among both maintained and independent schools. There are already several pilot YSBs in operation, one of which has been successfully running for several years at ISC’s own Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen.

Of those UK schools that provide buses, some make considerable financial sacrifices to buy their own, charging very little or nothing to pupils, or they charter buses from private companies. As well as frequently being costly, these buses often cannot be designed with the school in mind (for example, featuring the school emblem), since later in the day they might be used to ferry grannies to Brighton.

A greater injustice is that in some maintained sector schools, pupils can receive free transport if they live within a certain distance of the school, but then ironically do not qualify for free transport if they live outside of that zone – that is, further away and in more need of such a facility. The government’s public services website states that “local authorities must provide transport where they consider it necessary to ensure that a child goes to school. If transport is necessary, then it must be provided free of charge”. The YSB scheme would seem to offer a solution to this if the idea is to assign a YSB to every school and enable all children to use them. Put like this, the worry naturally arises: might it be rather over-optimistic to hope that every child in every school could have access to a YSB?

Two niggling questions remain to be answered, despite vigorous discussion on Monday.

Firstly, would there be a charge to use these buses and is 50p a reasonable one-way fare? Secondly, if pupils didn’t have to pay, where would the money come from to fund the assembly, maintenance and running of the YSB fleets?

One suggestion from a coach operator present was to raise taxes paid by car-owners; another was to continue with what has been a success already with (among others) Runnymede District Council: corporate sponsorship. The theme park giant Thorpe Park ‘sponsors’ a fleet of yellow school buses: they pay for the upkeep and the buses display their logo, thereby advertising Thorpe Park and giving it social brownie points. Interestingly this is rather similar to the set up of Academies. However, presumably this will not work everywhere. A remote countryside prep school may have no appropriately sized or interested companies nearby that would find it in their interests to sponsor a fleet of buses to supply the school.

One final interesting point to consider is that because independent and maintained schools often have different start and finish times to their school day, school buses that serve the local independent schools have to do a trip encompassing an unnecessarily large area – sometimes picking up the furthest pupil hours before they eventually get dropped off at their school.

Were pupils from the two sectors to share buses, the staggered start times would mean a more tight-knit collection zone for the driver, shorter on-board waiting times for each child who is picked up, and a lower overall carbon emission time on the road. There are certainly still some creases to iron out, but overall the YSB could be a recipe for success both on and off the road, and in the drive to a greener school run.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 11:15 am by Holly Harris and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.