Tag Archives: travel to school

Home to School transport

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What level of transport from home to school should the State provide for parents? At present, this is an area of policy that rarely seems to be reviewed. For instance, when the learning leaving age was raised to eighteen, the rules on free transport to school were not changed. As a result, many pupils that receive free transport up to age sixteen, and the end of Year 11, no longer qualify for free transport in Years 12 or 13, even if they remain at the same school.

Yes, some local authorities do pay for SEND transport for post-16 students, but it is not a requirement to do so. TfL still provide generous free transport for young people resident in London, although the Elizabeth Line beyond West Drayton to Reading isn’t included.

The question must be: if young people in London can qualify for free bus and tram travel, why must those living elsewhere in England depend upon local rules set by the upper tier local authority? The answer, of course, is that local authorities must fund the home to school transport budget, and it needs to compete against all other priorities, whereas in London, the transport authority, TfL, foots the bill for transport costs.  

Most authorities now only pay for transport over three miles (2 miles for pupils under eight, but above statutory school age) to the nearest school if selected first at the time of the admissions process. There may be different rules for selective secondary schools, and some authorities won’t pay for travel to these schools if located in the area of another authority despite the fact that most are now academies.

For instance, Essex County Council and Castle Point Unitary Authority state that:

Grammar (selective) school

Children from low income families qualify for school transport if they live 2 or more miles from the selective school.

School transport will also be provided if the selective school is closer than the nearest maintained school or academy and 3 miles or more away. School transport: Who qualifies for home to school transport – Essex County Council

This means that many parents have to pay to send a child to a selective school unless they qualify as a low-income family.

In rural areas there may not be bus services, and local authorities will only pay where a road is deemed unsafe due to traffic. Any alternative route less than three miles, even if an unlit footpath across fields, often doesn’t qualify for free transport unless an appeal panel is willing to go outside the rules.

In their 2023-24 budget, Oxfordshire has a figure of around £30 million for home to school transport, so it isn’t an insignificant issue for rural counties. The bulk of this was for transporting pupils to mainstream schools and not for SEND transport.

So here are some policy suggestions for discussion

  • Raise the current age level for transport to the same school from 16 to 18
  • Ensure SEND transport to both schools and colleges
  • Negotiate student fares with both bus and train operators as similar rates for same journey
  • Merge school transport with active travel policies to encourage car pooling or use of local community transport
  • Pay bike vouchers to encourage cycling to school
  • Review national guidelines on what constitutes ‘safe routes’ to exclude footpaths or bridleways for inclusion and only include roads
  • Create a national policy for travel to selective schools funded by central government as these schools are no longer ’local’ schools
  • Prevent state schools from running their own buses
  • Ensure any child offered a paid for place has the place available for a whole school year.
  • Amend the mileage rule to cover all sites for split site schools

The present distance rules were set many years ago. Is it still acceptable in this modern age to use a three-mile limit or should it be reduced?

Finally, how should any changes be paid for? Should there be a national scheme, as for the bus pass for the elderly, and should the rules be more favourable for London than for rural areas, especially where house prices may be more expensive in the rural areas than in London, and salaries don’t take this into account?

Please sue the comments section to discuss.

Paying more for school transport

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The County Councils Network has recently released a new report which analyses the challenges county authorities face in delivering home to school transport services, including the impact of the record fuel price increases. Councils face difficult decisions as spiralling fuel prices impact on school transport services, report warns – County Councils Network

With fuel prices hitting record highs this month, the CCN is warning that this is having a significant impact on school transport services, with councils facing having to pay providers significantly more for operating school services and providing taxis.

According to the County Councils Network the local authorities that supplied data to this study transported 248,000 pupils for free last year, of which 51,000 were young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

The report calls for short-term support for local authorities to help weather the storm of rising fuel prices, which has, according to the research, led to transport companies re-tendering for contracts up to 20% higher than last year.

Even before the fuel price increase, county authorities were facing yearly increases in costs in home to school transport services, particularly for SEND pupils.

Released ahead of the government’s long-awaited SEND Review, the report by the County Councils Network urges the Government’s review of SEND to address the root causes of a rise in costs and demand in SEND services, including home to school transport. The report finds an increasing number of pupils becoming eligible for Education, Health and Care Plans and an increase in young people attending special schools.

Based on data from 28 CCN member councils, the report finds:

  • County authorities spent a total of £555.6m on free school transport last year, up from £472.6m in 2016/17. This increase is largely down to a 33% rise in expenditure for pupils with SEND – up from £250m five years ago to £336m in 2021. This is the equivalent of 11% of on average council’s entire children’s services budget.
     
  • The number of pupils using SEND free school transport has increased from 41,185 in 2016/17 to 51,558 in 2020/21 – a rise of 10,373 pupils. Over the last three years, the average cost of individual pupils has increased by £206 to £6,099 a year – due to rising costs, such as fuel price increases.
     
  • Almost two-thirds of councils (60%) who responded to a separate survey for the report said that their expenditure on SEND school transport was ‘unsustainable’ and 34% said it was ‘difficult.’ Just one said it was ‘manageable’. Costs for taxis, private hire, and minibuses for these pupils had increased from £175m in 2016 to £244m in 2021.
     
  • Despite yearly growth in population numbers, and rising costs, councils’ expenditure on mainstream home to school transport has remained the same throughout the period – £212m in 2016 to £208m in 2021.

Council taxpayers have to pay the cost of any transport not covered by government grants and that is a burden not carried by those living in urban areas where most home to school transport costs fall on families.

As a result of cost pressures, many councils have had little choice but to reduce eligibility for free school transport for mainstream home to transport due to facing significant financial pressures over the period, including in SEND school transport. There were almost 20,000 fewer mainstream pupils using free transport to their school in 2021 compared to 2016/17.

Especially mean cuts are where only transport tot the ‘nearest’ school is provided and there is a system of selective education. The selective school will rarely be the nearest school and so families may not be able to take up a place at a selective school if they cannot afford the transport costs. As a twin, I understand how this can impact on some families.

The situation is even worse where the selective school is an academy in another authority as face children, for example, on Canvey Island, part of Castel Point local authority and where the nearest selective schools are in the city of Southend-on-Sea.

Councils need to publish data on how much of their home to school transport to academies is funded by government grant and how much by council Tax payers and through business rates.  

The government might also need to consider help for small rural schools that are using oil for heating, as those costs have risen sharply as well. It would be unfair if the present world situation hastened the end of rural primary schools and thus forced costs for transport even higher, threatening other local services as cash had to be diverted into supporting yet more school transport.

8th Birthday

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Today, 25th January, is the 8th birthday of this blog. Last year the blog’s 7th birthday was a very special occasion, as it coincided with the 1,000th post. This year, the blog has reached 1,106 posts, including this one. Last year, in the celebration post, I mused about stopping at 1,000 posts as viewer numbers were falling away. Throughout the spring there were relatively few posts, but then came the pandemic and a new impetus to communicate education stories.

The blog has also found a new audience in the USA, were visitors numbers have never been higher than in the past six months. Indeed, the autumn witnessed a resurgence in readership, with views in October 2020 being higher than in any month since January 2018, when the fall off in views started; reaching a low point in February last year, of fewer than 20 views a day that month.

The most read post of the past twelve months was the one about the PISA Study entitled ‘Poverty is not Destiny – OECD PISA Report’ that has had 1,592 views since it appeared on the 30th September 2020. I hope that the most recent post ‘Jacob’s Law’ will do similarly well, as it also deals with a very important issue.

In the past year, the posts have totalled some 63,000 words, for an average of around 550 words per post. That’s close to my aim of creating easy to read posts of around 500 words. There have been 128 likes of the posts, and 75 comments, including my responses to comments from other people.

The past year also witnessed the 50th anniversary, earlier this month, of the start of my teaching career, and I celebrated that event with a special post.

The covid-19 pandemic has shaped all our lives, and the lack of statistics, not least about attainment, has influenced what posts could and could not be scribed. The blog still aims to look at stories behind the numbers, but also now ranges more widely across the education landscape.

Today also makes a special day for TeachVac, the free job board for teachers www.teachvac.co.uk where I am chair of the Board. A significant milestone in registered users was passed today. The platform has retained some 77% of all registered users, a higher figure than this blog. But, then it serves a different purpose.

So, what lies ahead? I hope to keep this blog going for another year, and aim to reach its 10th birthday in January 2024. However, other distractions could always mean a premature end to my writing, especially if viewing figures once again slide away to a level where the effort does not seem worthwhile.

After all, I might have a new career writing travel books, based upon the success of Twin Tracks https://www.facebook.com/twintracksthebook price £12.99 if ordered directly from the Facebook page or web site or by email to me.

Thanks for reading; keep safe and remember that education is a wonderful job, despite what many parents have discovered.

Don’t forget rural areas

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When Chris Grayling was the Secretary of State for Transport he announced a new rail saver card for 16-17 year olds. From September, this group will now have access to some of the cheapest peak time rail fares, not only to travel to and from college and school, but also for leisure use.

The DfT, now under new leadership, recently issued a press notice about the new card https://www.gov.uk/government/news/over-one-million-people-to-save-hundreds-as-new-16-17-saver-launches-cutting-cost-of-rail-travel-for-teenagers There must be questions about the claim of the number of young people that will benefit, especially in the absence of any indication that you don’t need to buy the card if you live in London and just travel to and from school or college. This is thanks to TfL arrangements that have increasingly taken many suburban rail lines into the overground network. The annual saving of an estimated £186 is good news for those that use the train, but not for all young people.

My concern has always been that this initiative does nothing for young people living in rural areas some distance away from rail lines and that cannot use them to access school or college places. In Oxfordshire, Witney, Burford, Wantage, Farringdon, Chipping Norton, Watlington and Wheatley, along with a host of other towns and villages, don’t have direct access to a railway station. Why hasn’t the government done a similar deal with the privatised bus companies to help these young people?

Alternatively, having raised the learning leaving age to 18, why hasn’t the DfE responded to this initiative by looking to change the home to school transport regulations so the upper age limit for free travel is 18 and not 16. This would come at a price to public finances, and would be more expensive to the public purse than a deal with bus operators, but to do nothing is a slap in the face for young people living in rural areas, especially if the Department for Transport is also interested in making it more difficult for them to use their own transport to reach schools and colleges, and has done nothing to make cycling safer.

This anti-rural area bias is just the sort of issue that might tip the balance in a few rural constituencies, were there to be a general election in the autumn. My Lib Dem colleagues could well mount campaigns along the lines of ‘Tories Take Rural Family vote for Granted’ and see what happens.

I haven’t seen any response from the National Union of Students or any of the teacher associations with members in rural areas. Neither have I seem the Local Government Association take up the cause of young people in rural areas. There is little time to change the situation for September, but I hope schools and colleges, where some pupils can benefit from the new card, will take action to ensure other students don’t drop out of education because of the cost of travel to school and college on top of all the other costs of studying faced by that age group.

Bad deal for rural students

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The fact that student living in London are provided with free travel to school or college by Transport for London has always been great for them, but I felt unfair on those living in the rest of the country. Free travel is also a great help to the family budget. This benefit to London sort of mirrors the complaints of the f40 group about how schools are funded across England.

The announcement by the Secretary of State for Transport on the 2nd January 2019 of a new railcard for 16 and 17 year olds just adds insult to injury for many young people living in rural areas. The new railcard isn’t an initiative from the rail industry. The department of Transport press release is very clear that the 26-30 year olds railcard is an industry initiative backed by the government, but that the card for 16 and 17 year olds is a government initiative and, therefore, can be seen as a political move.

Indeed, the press notice points out that the new card for 16 and 17 year olds includes half price for peak and season tickets, something not generally available on other railcards.

To rub salt in the wounds, the press notice goes on to announce that the ‘railcard could cut the cost of travel by hundreds of pounds a year for young people and their parents [sic], making it cheaper to get to school, college and work’. All very well if you live near a railway line.

At Oxfordshire’s Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, I asked a question about how the card would affect those not living near a railway line? For many, once the card comes into operation and the £30 purchase fee has been discounted, rail travel will be half the price of a similar bus journey, even assuming there is a bus after the rounds of cuts to such services.

The withdrawal of the Education Maintenance Allowance for 16-18 year olds in England by the Coalition and the refusal to change the rules on home to school transport after the raising of the learning leaving age, was an unfair allocation of resources that penalised students not able to walk or cycle to school or college.

Doing something for those that have a handy railway, but ignoring everyone else in rural areas, is an own goal for the government that may well feature in campaigning for the district council elections this May in the worst affected areas.

In Oxfordshire the 16-17 year olds in Wantage could well be paying twice the price of their college buddies that live in Didcot in order to attend classes, because the County has never progressed the re-opening of Grove Station that has been an aspiration for more than 20 years.

Similarly, those 16 and 17 year old student living in Charlbury will benefit if travelling to college in Oxford, but those living in Chipping Norton or Burford won’t when travelling to Witney.

Time for a rethink Mr Grayling.

 

Commuting pupils: are most to be found in London?

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How much does the provision of free transport affect the choice of secondary school in London? What is clear from data published recently by the DfE is that pupils in London, and especially those living in Inner London, are among the most mobile in the country, especially at secondary school level when it comes to attending a state school outside the boundaries of the local authority where they live.  https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2018

The percentage of pupils living and attending schools in a local authority, as a percentage of resident population, ranged from almost 100% in Cumbria to just 54.6% in Knowsley in Merseyside. However, along with Reading, at just less than 64% attending schools in the borough, these latter two authorities were very much outliers. Some 26 of the 30 mainland local authorities with the lowest percentage of their resident population attending schools in the authority at secondary school level were London boroughs. I don’t know how much of the explanation in Reading is a combination of the presence of two highly selective schools and a distribution of schools dictated during the twenty years when Reading was part of the County of Berkshire before it was broken up into different unitary authorities.

History, as well as free transport, may also play a part in the reasons why London figures so largely in the authorities with the most movement. For around a century, school building in Inner London was governed by a single agency; first the LCC and then the ILEA (Inner London Education Authority) that was abolished by Mrs Thatcher’s government. In outer London, although the creation of the boroughs dates back more than 50 years, many of the secondary schools in north and west London were built on sites created by the former Middlesex County Council.

The creation of academies, free schools, UTCs and studio Schools will also have help encourage movement of pupils, but, I suspect, to a lesser degree than the historical location of schools.

Although there is cross authority movement at the primary school level, it tends to be at a lower level as most pupils will attend their nearest school except when different demographic pressures put pressure on specific schools in urban areas creating a movement across boundaries. By contrast, the movement across local boundaries for pupils in the special school sector is higher than in either the primary or secondary sectors in many local authority areas. This is not really a surprise, since creating specialist schools is often more cost effective if they can reach a certain size and not every authority wants to provide specialist provision for every type of need.

Outside of London, many of the pupils moving across boundaries will have to pay for their own travel costs, as authorities have modified their travel policies, in an effort to reduce expenditure. However, county council’s expenditure on travel is still a large burden to many authorities, especially for children living in rural areas where the local bus service has now disappeared and either a special bus must be run or a taxi provided at significant cost to the authority.

 

Don’t the Tories care?

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Rumours about what might be in the budget regarding education are rife across the media today. We know of more money for T levels in further education but, more grammar school places are also being touted as a likely outcome.

One particularly pernicious suggestion that I have heard mention is that the Chancellor will announce that the rules on home to school transport will be altered. At present, outside the TfL area in London, where transport is free, most pupils only receive free transport if their nearest school with a place is over two miles for children up to eight and three miles for children over eight and up to sixteen. There are exceptions where the route is unsafe and for children whose parents are on certain benefits. The latter normally have a wider range of schools to select from where free travel is available.

The rumour suggests that this provision will be extended to allow all pupils free travel to a selective school up to fifteen miles away from their home. Now, one would have assumed that was the case anyway in selective authorities, but at least one such authority tried to create a ‘nearest school’ policy regardless of whether it was a grammar or a secondary modern, condemning some parents to pay to take up places at grammar schools. Preventing this anomaly seems sensible. Less sensible is applying the rule to any child within say 15 miles offered a place and forcing non-selective local authorities to pay for the transport cost even if it means a taxi at £5,000 per place per year.

More sensible would be for the Chancellor to take a look at the transport rules for post-16 pupils. There is no statutory requirement to provide free transport for this age group despite the raising of the learning leaving age to eighteen. The cost is most keenly felt by parents in Tory controlled rural areas, many of which are fully non-selective. Here there is often little choice except between a single secondary school and a distant further education college offering very different ranges of courses. In some areas, with sixth form or tertiary colleges, there is no choice if a child wants to remain in education. For pupils with special needs the distance can be even greater to attend specialist provision.

In my view, if the Chancellor is trying to do more than clear up the anomaly created by some Tory authorities trying to save money, he should support free transport for all 16-19 pupils on the same basis as for pupils from 8-16 ahead of favouring younger children attending selective schools.

Of course, he could go further and offer the same deal to all pupils across the country as pupils receive in London, free transport to all children regardless of distance travelled within the TfL area, but that would really cause chaos, even if it boosted parental choice. Not much chance of that then.