Bus pass cost for 6th form

Good grief!! Mine went to a specialist college that was, admittedly, fairly remote - he had the choice of a free bus or a train pass that cost us £18 a year. (This was last year and the year before).

We pay >£700/year, and have had to pay throughout the whole of secondary school. It’s ridiculous.

And this is funded by the government in Scotland.

Some 6th forms offer financial help towards bus costs, I’m a single parent so got a bursary.

Annual bus pass for my daughter was over 1k per year!! It’s cheaper for her to pay daily with the £3 bus cap so I £30 a week for her to get to college!!

I paid £85/month for DS a few years ago. So roughly the same. Then in the March, I had an email to say they'd applied for some funding for us because of our post code (deprived area) and we were awarded some money. So I got most of it back.
I then had to pay the following year and got most of it back again.
It was like a mini savings fund 😂

It’s ridiculous. It’s £103 a month for DD. Because she is an older one from Y13 that will go up as she will no longer be able to get a 16/17 railcard. Grrr

It is going to be cheaper for her to drive which I think is bloody ridiculous!!!!!!!

£352 per term here.

Considering getting her a bicycle for summer

I heard yesterday that DS's old school are concerned about post-16 travel. The prohibitive cost and lack of availability is starting to affect sixth form applications.

We are in a fairly rural area so not much chance of a city hall-style joined up transport/education policy here sadly.

London here too. 16-19 year olds have free bus travel and reduced train costs too after paying for an initial £20 Zip card. The benefit of a joined up travel policy from City Hall in London and the same policy applied too by Andy Burnham in Manchester. Way too many private bus companies elsewhere completely massively overcharging.

I paid £507 for dd’s bus pass this term, she’s year 13 and last year, the year 12’s finished the last week of June for work experience and other stuff, but I still had to pay the full terms bill. Only two more to go!

£1300 for our catchment school. We WFH so could have driven DS but he is moving on to a school in a different county and can use a young persons bus pass so only £1 each way on public buses.

The charge has almost doubled since last year. It was a shock for those whose DC are staying at the catchment school. Unless they looked up the costs before deciding on post-16 moves they would have been unaware because the school don't get involved in transport issues.

What a perverse situation that there will be DC unable to remain at the same school they've attended for years for further education that is compulsory because they've had to move to a more affordable option.

That is so expensive. We are in a London. 16-19 free bus travel. One option would have involved train which would have set me back quite a bit

I think we are either at the same college or at least a college with the same deal, but we are only 3 miles from college so it makes it slightly more expensive than the private transport we used for school.
The bonus being for ours is that it does cover the entire bus network for the whole school year so that's weekend trips to town, cinema, meeting friends and even days out to other local towns all covered now.

Our buses have just been ‘re zoned’ and it will now cost £400 a term for a bus pass.

Free in Scotland but we have higher taxes.

That's cheap! We are in exactly the same position but ours is over £400 per term. Its actually cheaper to get the public bus, which is the plan.

Sounds like ours in suffolk. Same price. Ridiculous

£1600 a year here. South East. Private coach company. 8 miles away, rural roads. It's tge nearest 6th form but in a different county so there isn't a school bus or any public transport. The service is only in existence because a group of parents organised it.

£1,320 per year here. It’s about 5 miles on busy roads with no pavement, so completely unwalkable.

Ours is currently £950 per child per year, I have to pay for all three of them. Luckily eldest has now passed her driving test and her insurance for the year was only £1400 so I'm off the hook for one year...

When I had 3 in school (~7 years ago now), they upped the cost to nearly £800 per year per child - at that point this was 10% of our family take home pay. And if they went to an after school club so had to catch a later bus it was another £3.20 a day for under 16 and £5.60 a day for age 16+. We stopped using the bus altogether and I did all the drop offs/pick ups instead. I know your costs are high, OP, but they are actually cheaper than many places. I hate it. It definitely put kids off applying for the better schools where I lived then.

My dd had a student bus pass, you could buy it with proof from college, was £295 for the year 6 years ago admittedly. Public buses anywhere in the city. here it’s £945 now but rural and covers wide range of areas plus on demand minibuses, every town has a 6th form so there’s an option to have zero travel bills, school is within 45 minutes walk of every house in the town and you can cycle from outlying farmland and villages

DD went to a college in the next town rather than her 6th form. Bus journey was £3.60 each way which conservatively is £345 per term.

Where we live she could get any local bus for £2 so it was a shock to be paying over £7 a day. Especially when there was no reduction for exam weeks and revision weeks (where she was told to WFH) or y13 when she finished in May but was paid up to July.

Can't believe some of the prices people have quoted. It's £800 a year here which is bad enough.

We only live 6 miles from the sixth form but the school bus doesn't come as far as us so our DC would have to get an extra bus to get into town to then catch the school bus 🙄

We share the sixth run with another family at the moment as the buses are such a faff and unreliable. They should be much cheaper as they're so crap!

We pay £700 per year in one or two installments. There are two buses each way per day for each route. And it does allow the use of any college bus on any route. The closest bus stop is one and half miles from our house and college is 14 miles from there. Its the nearest place to do a-levels so not much choice really.