26. Most LEAs contract out at least some home-to-school transport to the private sector, although some authorities have in-house vehicles and vehicle fleets of a variety of sizes. Children are taken to school in coaches, taxis and buses. Season tickets may also be provided for public bus, rail and ferry services.

27. This chapter looks at the problems with school buses, identified from our evidence, and at the measures that might be tried to address these in the pilot LEAs. These include charging for school buses, the easing of current bus regulation and the use of dedicated buses of the "Yellow Bus" type.

Safety of school buses

28. Mr Steven Salmon, Operations Director of the Confederation of Passenger Transport (CPT), was worried that the industry had "colluded with some rather thrifty authorities to provide a transport experience which really leaves a lot be desired".[39] The organisation BUSK (Belt Up School Kids), which has campaigned for eleven years for improvements in school transport safety, said that some LEAs could be seen as the best customer of the cowboy operator.[40]

29. Surrey County Council identified three key features of school transport which would persuade parents to use the school bus rather than the private car.[41] The service should:

• provide the highest practical levels of safety and comfort
• create confidence that the service is dependable and punctual and
• ensure children were under trained supervision and protection from the point of collection until handed into the care of school authorities.

Specification of bus tenders

30. The easiest way to improve the safety and comfort of school buses would be to specify minimum service quality standards in tenders. However, Mr Salmon told us that the specification for buses for the use of the general public was much higher than the specification applied by the same authority for vehicles to carry school children.[42] Although LEAs are required to secure best value when negotiating school transport contracts, contracts are traditionally awarded to the "lowest price bidder as a poor interpretation of best value provider".[43]

31. Our evidence confirmed that school bus contracts varied widely and that there was a lack of information about such contracts. For example, it was difficult to establish how widespread was the use of the three-for-two[44] rule on school buses. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport, Mr Jamieson MP, understood that most local authorities ruled out the three-for-two rule[45] and Councillor Tony Page, Joint Chair of the Home to School Working Party for the Local Government Association, said that their authorities did not apply the three-for two rule at all.[46] But Ms James, Senior Assistant Secretary of the Professional Advice Department of the NAHT, told us that in her members' experience, the practice was quite widespread.[47] Similarly, there is no common standard for the use of seat belts.[48] Indeed, the Minister said that there could be difficulties contracting buses with seat belts for the school trip in the morning when there is high demand for buses.[49]

32. When we asked whether the shortage of companies tendering for school bus contracts meant that it was time to look at the tendering regime, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Rt Hon Charles Clarke MP, admitted that he did not have the information he would need to make such a judgement.[50]

"To be blunt our data is not very good in the Department of Education on these matters. We require local education authorities to secure best value when negotiating school transport contracts, that is the obligation, but we do not collect information across the country about this in order to make a judgment of the kind you are suggesting. There might well be a case for doing that, I would acknowledge…"

33. We were surprised that the Government admits that it does not know about the effects of the best value regime on the quality of school buses. It is clear from our evidence that many authorities interpret "best value" as "lowest cost". This must be wrong. The Government should set national minimum standards for LEA school bus contracts.

Maintenance

34. The CPT claimed that too many authorities compound their low quality specifications by "failing to ensure that they get even the minimal standard for which they have paid and entering into accommodations with sub-standard contractors in order to avoid the increased costs that would follow from terminating the relevant contract."[51] Responsible LEAs work with the Vehicle Inspectorate to enforce safety standards, but Mr Garth Goddard, County Transport Co-ordinator, Cheshire County Council, admitted that even they did not pick up every safety failure. He cited a recent instance where checks by the Vehicle Inspectorate had found 10 out of 11 of a contractor's vehicles to be unroadworthy.

"There certainly is enforcement of safety standards, but it is not so universal as to mean that we are picking up everything… just a few weeks ago we had a situation where, together with the Vehicle Inspectorate and the police, my inspectors descended on a school in Cheshire. They inspected the 11 contract vehicles provided by one company and ten of them were excluded from further operation immediately for safety reasons…there are some operators not necessarily the big operators on the fringe of the operation that supposedly meet the required standards, but on inspection they are found to be wanting.[52]

The current system produces some school buses which are demonstrably dangerous. This should not be allowed.

Age of school buses

35. Even if technically roadworthy, buses used for home-to-school transport are often 20-30 years old. Surrey County Council told us that current school services "for cost purposes are often delivered by using life extended luxury coaches".[53] Older vehicles are more likely to develop technical faults. Mr Goddard said that he could "envisage situations where an elderly bus might run into problems which could present quite a serious situation for the relatively young children on board".[54] Old buses cannot be, and so do not have to be, provided with seat belts because the anchorage points are not sufficiently strong.[55] One way to avoid the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (at least until the middle of the next decade) is to use old buses and coaches. The CPT is concerned that children could "enter adult life with a perception that buses and coaches are a low grade means of transport for people with no choice."[56] It is unacceptable for school children to be forced to use the oldest buses on the road.

Supervision

36. It is clear both that the behaviour of school children on public transport can make other people's journeys unpleasant and that the unsupervised school journey can be an unpleasant experience for a child. It was put to us that there is nowhere else in which up to 100 young people would be left in a confined space without supervision for up to an hour.[57] Legally, the bus driver is responsible for managing passenger behaviour but it is hard to see how this can be safely combined with driving the bus. Supervision is even more difficult on a double deck bus and a recent fatal school bus accident involving a double deck bus was attributed to pupil misbehaviour.[58] In contrast, "parents will often feel that if they put their child in the car, they know that the child will arrive calm and safe and have a good experience."[59]

37. Mr Neal thought that escorts for the school buses could be provided from the resources given for support staff for schools.[60] Somerset County Council have introduced a scheme where schools run their own buses and employ drivers who are support staff undertaking other duties during the school day.[61] The journey to school will be safer and pleasanter if escorts are used on school buses. The Department for Transport and the Department for Education and Skills should promote the use of support staff for such purposes and should offer incentives.

Bus regulation

38. Mr Page told us that the competitive tendering provisions of the Transport Act 1985 prevent local authorities from providing a stable and regulated framework for school services.[62] The changes to these provisions they thought would help were the following:

• The ability to create seats for sale on 'education contracts' without registering as a registered service route;
• Allowing local authorities to conduct post tender negotiations; and
• Allowing local authorities to enter into local bus contracts of more than five years.

39. The draft Bill addresses the first of these concerns by providing for the suspension of section 6 of the 1985 Act so that bus services taking paying children, provided under school travel schemes, do not have to be registered with the Traffic Commissioners.

40. The length of tenders was also mentioned by the CPT, who said that the short-term nature of school bus contracts were a disincentive for its members to procure newer vehicles[63] and by Wiltshire LEA, which has told the Secretary of State that it would like eight year cycles for their bus procurement.[64] The DfT intends to introduce a regulatory reform order which would alter section 90 of the 1985 Act to increase the maximum length of tendered services from five to eight years.[65] However, it is clear that the very earliest this reform could be implemented is January 2005.[66]

41. However the question of post tender negotiations is not addressed; these are only allowed under the 1985 Act when an authority does not receive any bids or does not feel that any bid received represents value for money.

42. Local authorities felt that competition issues were preventing them from providing better school bus services. Councillor Tony Page said that they would like the pilot schemes to allow a local authority, in conjunction with a local operator or group of operators, to promote services which would be protected from disruption by another operator coming in.[67] Mr Goddard also mentioned the competition issues in response to a question about the strictures imposed by the Office of Fair Trading:

"Rather than tendering for services to fill in the gaps in the commercial network and to provide school transport, I would like to sit down with groups of operators to see how we can solve the problems of bus transport in this area, so that they get their commercial return through the definition of some commercial routes, but also so that we can have a much more integrated approach to the whole development of the local network. It is a very sad situation now, that the commercial operators provide one network and we provide almost two networks, a local bus network and a schools network. The three really need to mesh together, but in fact it would be much better if the meshing together was done in the planning stage rather than after everybody had planned and implemented separately." [68]

43. The Minister said that he did not want to see improving school transport by bus as a "Trojan horse for re-organising buses locally",[69] however the Secretary of State, in his evidence, appeared more amenable to the idea of a relaxation of the regulatory regime:

"I agree that if we were able to get a real push into this area so we were seen to be committing to bus services and a variety of different services, we would be more likely to get more people ready to enter the market and if we got a regulatory regime which was sympathetic to that, all the more so." [70]

44. The Committee welcomes the Government's willingness to make some changes to the Transport Act 1985 but is disappointed that the Bill does not give the LEAs more discretion to propose changes to the legal and regulatory framework when they pilot school travel schemes. It should be possible for local authorities to look at ways of integrating their school transport with other public transport they support. As the lead Department, the Department for Transport should, as a matter of urgency, establish a working group to consider how services could be integrated, and what regulatory changes are needed. These are pilot schemes, and that each scheme must be approved by the Government before being put into place; authorities should have far more freedom to experiment with new ways of specifying and providing school transport as part of a wider transport system. Tendering issues should be addressed as a school transport issue.

Charging for school buses

45. The Bill will allow a LEA to charge parents for school transport for children, other than "protected" children, that is, those entitled to free school meals. Since there is currently almost 100% take-up of free school transport[71] our witnesses believed that charges for school transport would have to be carefully pitched, or they would encourage parents to drive children who currently use public transport.[72]

46. Independent research into the price elasticity of bus travel shows that price increases above the level of inflation lead to an immediate loss of passengers and a long term loss of income.[73] The CPT did not believe that introducing an affordable fare for children who currently travel free would "be enough to make a worthwhile difference to people who pay."[74] The Sutton Trust drew attention to parents' tendency to distort the comparison between bus and car by consistently underestimating true vehicle running costs and the value of their time.[75]

47. Parents have been willing to pay for the yellow bus pilots although there has been a price resistance to anything over £1 per day per child, which does not cover the full cost of the service.[76] Mr Neil Monnery, Vice President of the Boston Consulting Group, felt that even with a charge of £1 a day take-up of bus transport would fall.[77] Mr Tony Neal, former President of the SHA, was concerned a charge for buses would be an extra charge on rural areas.[78] In the Irish Republic, charges have been introduced at the maximum rate of €100 (£70) a term per family. This has not apparently affected the take-up of school transport but it coincided with a focus on the quality of the service.[79] Although parents may be willing to pay £5 a week for one child they are unlikely to be prepared to pay £15 a week for three children, if they have access to a car. Any charging schemes should include a family ticket or a discount for more than one child.

48. There may be other ways to make payment palatable. We were told of an imaginative scheme in Surrey where a weekly, monthly or termly season ticket, which can work out at a daily charge of £1 a day for the school bus, entitles the pupil to unlimited use of the bus service outside school hours.[80] The scheme also encourages other family members to use the bus.

49. The method of charging is also crucial. For security reasons fares should not be collected on the bus.[81] We were told by Ms James that charging on a daily or weekly basis risks increasing truancy.[82] However, charging in advance can be a burden. Mr Martin Ward, Deputy General Secretary of the SHA, claimed that at a particular school where children were not eligible for free transport many families found it hard to find the lump sum of £45 per term needed for the bus. Collecting fares itself is not cost free.

"If the school is burdened with administration collecting this from pupils or parents, or a bus operator has to collect this individually by the driver, a fair proportion of that will go in admin costs." [83]

50. There may also be difficulties in ensuring that children who are entitled to free travel actually get it. DfES is looking at electronic access to benefits and tax credit details to address the problem of providing free transport for those children who qualify, but are not registering, for free school meals.[84] There may also be data protection issues to be resolved before this information can be used. Any scheme must ensure that means testing does not deter children who are entitled to free school transport from using it. The effects of schemes must be monitored and if monitoring shows that some of the arrangements piloted are preventing poor children using school transport they should be stopped.

Yellow buses

51. It may be that charging will increase parental pressure for high quality buses. FirstGroup plc has been running US-style yellow school bus pilots in partnership with parents, schools and local authorities in Calderdale in Yorkshire and Runnymede in Surrey since February 2002. Runnymede Borough Council told us that despite being a non-education authority it had been able to run its yellow bus scheme under the "well-being powers" with the active support of the business community.[85] Further schemes in Wokingham, Aberdeen and Windsor & Maidenhead were introduced in 2003. Several other local authorities have introduced dedicated school bus schemes, which incorporate some of the pilot area schemes' features but use different vehicle types.[86] Some local authorities, including Cheshire, have introduced yellow buses for their free home-to-school transport as an alternative to existing school transport contracts.[87]

52. Many, if not all, of the vehicles used in the various schemes, are imported from the United States. They are modified to meet UK bus and coach regulations, including those relating to seat spacing, step heights and gangway widths. FirstGroup was granted special authorisation in terms of seats over the wheel-arches and destination equipment. The buses themselves are high-capacity, purpose-built vehicles which enable a service to be provided that does not necessitate pupils standing or the use of double deck buses. They are not wheelchair accessible, with the exception of one type which has a lift. FirstGroup has been pressing the DfT to agree that there should be a special category of bus called "school bus" where some requirements could be eased.[88]

53. The other key elements of yellow bus schemes are that each bus has the same driver every day who has received special training, and each child has an allocated seat, as happens in the United States. The DfT only allows the buses to carry children under 18. The yellow buses running in Aberdeen could otherwise be used for university students.[89]

54. The Government commissioned consultants, Steer Davies Cleave, to examine the first yellow bus pilot schemes and similar LEA schemes. They found that the introduction of a "yellow bus package" of measures could generate positive modal shift away from cars, improve the perception of home to school transport and could result in improved behaviour and reduced vandalism. The modal shift from car to Yellow School Bus was found to be up to 10%.[90] The survey found that people said that if yellow buses were available they would use them, and the main reason given for not using yellow buses was that they were not available in their area. So far the schemes have only been used in small areas. A yellow bus scheme tested over a wider area would allow a more detailed evaluation of travel behaviour.[91]

55. The Sutton Trust recommends that to maximise the benefits of modal shift from cars, yellow school bus schemes should focus on primary school children who travel more than a mile to school. Research commissioned from the Boston Consulting Group indicates that each year there are 500 million "school run" car journeys for this group, accounting for about half of all school run car journeys.[92] The research found that spending £184 million per year to provide buses for primary school children travelling more than a mile to school would result in benefits valued at £458 million per year. This figure includes the time savings for parents who no longer drive their children to school and the savings from decreased congestion caused by them no longer needing to do so. If only one of the pilot travel schemes includes a "yellow bus" scheme we recommend that the scheme is conducted on a large enough scale to assess its potential impact on modal shift. Unnecessary regulatory obstacles to using "yellow buses" for complementary purposes should be removed.

40   ST 09 Back

41   ST 02 Back

42   Q 81 Back

43   ST 06  Back

44   Regulation 5(1) of the Public Service Vehicle (Carrying Capacity) Regulations 1984 allows three seated children under 14 to count as two passengers if seat belts are not fitted. Back

45   Q 154 Back

46   Q 36 Back

47   Q 52 Back

48   Q 56 Back

49   Q 171 Back

50   Q 213 Back

51   ST 07 Back

52   Q 278 Back

53   ST 02 Back

54   Q 277 Back

55   Q 149 Back

56   ST 07 Back

57   Q 51 Back

58   Q 51 Back

59   Q 72 Back

60   Q 69 Back

61   DfES, DfT, Travelling to School: an action plan, 2003 Back

62   Q 31 Back

63   Q 104 Back

64   Q 214 Back

65   Department for Transport  Back

66   The Cabinet Office Regulatory Action Plan says that it will be out for consultation by March Back

67   Q 32 Back

68   Q 286 Back

69   Q 146 Back

70   Q 214 Back

71   Travelling to school: an action plan Back

72   ST 01 Back

73   ST 07 Back

74   ST 07 Back

75   ST 12 Back

76   ST 06 Back

77   Q 122 Back

78   Q 59 Back

79   ibid Back

80   Q 18 Back

81   ST 06 Back

82   Q 62 Back

83   Q 114 Back

84   Q 206 Back

85   ST 14  Back

86   DfT, Evaluation of first yellow bus pilot schemes, November 2003 Back

87   ST 13 Back

88   Q 133 Back

89   Q 131 Back

90   DfT, Evaluation of first yellow bus pilot schemes, November 2003 Back

91   Q 126 Back

92   ST 12 Back