School children should receive free bus travel before pensioners?

[Itchthescratch]

My child is starting a school where it will cost around £2k for bus travel. This school is local and one of the closest schools to us. The other schools close to us are much worse in terms of opportunities and academic outcomes. I can afford the bus fare easily but I worry that some poorer families will really struggle to send their children to the higher achieving school because of the cost.

I understand that there isn't an endless pot of money but surely it would make sense to give school children free travel ahead of other groups like pensioners? School children are statistically much more likely to suffer from poverty (child poverty is almost double pensioner poverty)and it seems crazy that we aren't supporting social mobility whilst we let all pensioners travel for free on buses.

Cognitive dissonance. Nice people don't write such nasty things.

Yes we have school buses but only if you live certain distances away from your catchment school.

If the bus isn’t filled then parents can apply for a “ privilege pass” which they pay for to fill up the bus.

Irony.

Some people have to do the NMW jobs like cleaners, shop assistants, careworkers, etc. If they lived on the breadline all their working lives, how did they have the means to build themselves a decent private pension, especially when workplace pensions weren’t compulsory 40 plus years ago?

MIL left school with no qualifications at 15. She did the normal thing for her time and was a SAHM to her three DC. FIL was a bricklayer and they lived a hand to mouth existence. When DH was a teenager, MIL went to work as a dinner lady. It is a nonsense to suggest ordinary working class people, especially married women in the 50s, 60s and 70s had the opportunity to save for any pension, never mind a good one. FIL died at 63 of cancer. MIL just had the state pension to live on for 35 years.

Yes, of course you're right but ultimately it does come down to choices. Both sets of my grandparents left school when they were 15 and worked blue collar jobs. The women didn't work and were SAHPs and like your MIL worked in MW jobs after their kids were raised. Both my grandfathers worked really hard and progressed in their areas and ended up with reasonable pensions.

Only 13% of pensioners rely on the state pension as their sole source of income and 20% as their primary source of income. We are talking about a small minority of pensioners here.

Your PILs aren't typical and lots of people that left school at 15 had opportunities to build pensions.

Pensioners are the generation which is the most responsible for the current state of the UK, much more than current parents and indefinitely more responsible than current children. And, as a generation, you are more responsible, than the current government.

Ok, now it is clear that your good faith didn't work out. What now? Is it better to let your generation to eat the little wealth which remains as well, because means testing free public transport would be pensioners bashing, or share it with people who didn't have a slightest say into getting the state to the current misery?

Good faith is a nice thing, but it sounds very close to "I'm all right, Jack".

Do you have a source for those for those figures?

It doesn't just come down to 'choices'. Education, aptitude and opportunity all have a part to play in shaping a person's life.

What responsibility do they have?

The Just Group carried out the analysis using ONS data. Happy googling.

Education and opportunity. The exact things people are desperate to deprived poor children of now with the bland insistence that they can just go to their local sink school.

My grandparents had no more education that your PILs by the sound of it. They actively sort out higher paid work and work with a pension. Most people can do this. Very few people are genuinely stuck in MW jobs all their lives with absolutely no alternative.

And for women, their rights. The generation these people are envious of lost their jobs when they married. The lucky few that didn’t, lost them when they had a child.

Sorry to piss on your chips but i remember the ONS classing workfare as employment

They are also the generation who fought for the rights @Itchthescratch now has

I won’t bother considering how much you’ve got wrong in every thread where you’ve ranted about pensioners.

You’ll give yourself a hernia if you continue with the envy.

Exactly!

sounds excessive...i pay a concesion for my ds16 taxi for his special school and it costs just short of £600....

Just like you have the opportunity to take financial responsibility for choosing to send your kids out of the area,

Not all people have the circumstances to make pension provision, its a fact of life but its becoming more normal now.

I don't get why you feel you need to penalise a vulnerable section of society to get what you want, just challenge the injustice of the system, why is it at the expense of pensioners.

What kind of area do you live in where “sink” schools (whatever they are) are the norm?

They voted for the governments responsible, most of them didn't try to stand in elections to do better, or campaign, or riot, or write articles or care.

To give a specific example - the generation which bought council houses and didn't even ask about them not being replaced should at least acknowledge that current families don't have the same options.

If you really think it's that simple, that's quite a naive mindset imo. And what do you mean, my PILs? Are you confusing me with another poster?

I don't think any of us voted for all those governments unless we changed allegiance regularly.

You were saying????????

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/apr/07/women-miners-strike-1984-wives-picket-lines

Yes, small percentage did. Majority of the generation?

I was going to stand as a councillor once. Guess what? I couldn’t afford it. They get shit wages. I had two children and a house to run.

Also, most of the rights you have today were fought for by the very generation you are denigrating.

When was your latest “riot” and what were you rioting for?