MPs have been told home-to-school transport should be renamed to manage parental expectations as part of a scrutiny session on the rising cost of home-to-school transport.
The session, a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee on 8 December, follows a National Audit Office (NAO) report that earlier this year gave an overall exceedance of £415 million from a total spend of £2.32 billion by local authorities in England.
Rose McArthur, Chair of the home-to-school transport working group at ADEPT, says the name “home-to-school transport” brings a problem with linguistics, implying it is a door-to-door service.
“There’s a huge problem with linguistics,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be home to school. It could be home to a bus stop. Or a bus stop to here, or a walking route to there.
“We are wanting children to get into education but how that happens doesn’t have to be a door-to-door taxi service. There is a level of expectation and a level overprovision that has been built into the system and that actually we could be really more fleet of foot, definitely use commercial bus services better, definitely use the bus franchising bill and all of that wonderful stuff that’s coming out, but we need education and transport to be working together to do that.”
Councillor Amanda Hopgood, Chair of the Children, Young People and Families Committee, Local Government Association, suggests a more appropriate term would be “assisted travel to school”. She adds: “If it’s assisted travel, and again, home to school transport might not always be from their home address, I think we need to look at that, we need to look at the criteria.”
She noted that the home-to-school legislation is particularly challenging to navigate for parents, calling it “not fit for purpose”. “We’re working on a 1940s system in 2025 and we need to be looking at the needs of family and parents in the 21st century,” she explains. “It’s a very different culture and world that we live in now to when these policies were brought in, and we’re trying to retrofit something to 65 years ago… longer than that. It’s just not fit for purpose going forward. We need to bring it up to date with what the modern family is and where schools are.”
