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.

No she didnt You did

No she didnt You did

Thank you 😊

DH walked 1.5 miles each way to and from his primary school from the age of five, along country lanes. He walked with his older sister for the first two years, until she went to secondary. After that, he had to walk on his own.

No, his mother never took any of her three DC to primary school. They all had to walk there and back by themselves.

I think means testing would be good for all demographics. I guess I'm very MN as my parents, in-laws, other older relatives and the people we know are all well-off pensioners (and there's me on £20k a year and their pensions exceed it by far) and say that they don't need the things given to them for free, but if we means tested then all different ages could benefit if they needed it.

When our DC were at secondary school, the nearest one, they didn’t qualify for bus passes. The children across the road did! Just the way it was measured. Bus fares were reasonable, plus it was on my way to work, so I’d drop one or both off sometimes.

Now one of our DGC goes to a selective state 6th form college, has to be driven to pick up the college bus, which has to be paid for, upfront, for the year. I think it costs almost £2k. The parents know that when they apply, and there are passes for those on low incomes. We have to make our choices depending on our means. Some universities will accept lower grades from applicants from deprived areas, or underperforming schools.

I’m a regular bus and tram pass user, like lots of less well off pensioners.

I don't think this stops it being a disadvantage or really dangerous to be honest.

My grandma literally walked miles to school through bombed out buildings. She survived and has fond memories but I don't think it would be something that most parents would find acceptable now.

If you don’t need them then you don’t apply.

Quote me where I state that they are equivalent. You won't be able to because I have never written this.

I used homosexuality and slavery laws as examples of legislation that was amended largely through public sentiment shifting and pressure being applied on politicians. The point is that we don't have to blindly accepting legislation and we don't need to shut up just because it's annoying for people that are charged with enforcing the legislation as @Differentforgirls was clearly trying to suggest.

You don't know at all. People can rent or own their houses. They can live with wider family and not own their own home. They could have prioritised spending money on things other than housing and have a huge bank balance or loads of investments. They could have flash cars and spend disposable income on fancy holidays instead of mortgage payments.

For someone that held such a supposedly senior position, you seen to completely lack any kind of insight into how people can structure their finances and you seem to be making snap assessments of people's financial position based on very little information.

its wild that pensioners get free travel. School children should all get free travel until 16 I reckon.

I didn’t “try” to suggest anything. I told you that you conflating a lifestyle choice of 2k per year bus fares isn’t equivalent to being a slave or being homosexual. Neither of which are lifestyle choices.

Or you could have a Government which sees both things as equal and provides them. Like Scotland.

You said in an earlier post that you understood that your children could be potentially disadvantaged if free transport was offered to everyone. I don’t think you would be happy with this, otherwise you wouldn’t be spending 2K on bus fares to get them to a better school.
The good schools, tend to have less behaviour problems and more resources. You won’t only get the academic children who would thrive going to a good school, you will also get the children who are disruptive, before you say it, I know disruptive children are entitled to a good education but it can have a massive impact on the children around them.
Every child deserves a fantastic education whether the child excels academically or vocationally, Free transport is just putting a sticking plaster on the issue.

I wrote about it being wrong for young children to be expected up walk two miles. You responded with:

It's legislation. I used to deal with parents like you. We all took turns as it was very wearing. Always the same ones
What do you think your post implies? I believe the first bit is a clear attempt to suggest that because the rules are enshrined in law that they shouldn't be questioned. The second part of your post outlines what you and your colleagues apparently thought of parents that disagreed with the legislation.

My post about homosexuality and slavery laws came after this and we written clearly to highlight how simply suggesting that something is legislation and can't be challenged is dangerous and wrong as a concept. You then ridiculously keep stating I was attempting some kind of equivalence of the issues which clearly wasn't my intention and I have reiterated this repeatedly and yet you still can't get your head around this.

At this point I have to conclude you are rage baiting by misrepresenting what I'm writing and denying what you have written yourself.

I agree but I was once the poor child stuck in the crap school and don't think that any child should be unable to attend a good school because of a bus fare.

I am not going to voluntarily deny my children access to the school as some kind of sacrificial lambs. If the system changed they may be disadvantaged and I would just have to suck it up. I still think that change is needed.

Of course it's a sticking plaster but that's like saying that giving people access to food banks is a sticking plaster. We live in the now and the kind of change we would need in order to make all schools decent or even equally good is many decades away. Not one political party has any idea how to do it. Labour aren't even trying right now. So the question is, is something better than nothing?

@Itchthescratch What is it with you and bending figures???

You state “pensioners being more obese than children” as if it’s a clincher, but it’s simply not true when you look at the actual data.

Childhood obesity is one of the UK’s biggest public‑health problems - far bigger than obesity in older adults. The Health Survey for England shows child obesity at around 15%, with rates even higher in deprived areas. That’s why it’s classed as a crisis. Pensioners aren’t the group driving obesity statistics, and they’re certainly not the ones overwhelming paediatric services.

But even if your claim were correct, it still wouldn’t justify taking bus passes away from older people. Obesity doesn’t determine who needs transport support. Mobility, independence, medical appointments, and social isolation do. Free bus travel for pensioners exists because many can’t drive, can’t walk long distances, and rely on buses to live anything resembling a normal life.

What percentage of pensioners are classified as obese? 35%
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/health-survey-for-england/2024/adults-overweight-and-obesity.

I agree with your final point, obesity shouldn't determine public transport support. Another poster was trying to justify not giving bus passes to children due to them having high levels of obesity. My post was in response to this and was intended to point out how farcical their argument was.

People go to food banks because they don’t have enough food, not because they want better food.
Change takes time, if enough people become dissatisfied, then that dissatisfaction can be the catalyst for change. Discontentment highlights what is no longer working. Free transport still wouldn’t offer a good education to all children. There still wouldn’t be enough places at the good schools, the goal posts would just move.

You’re comparing two completely different datasets as if they’re interchangeable.

The 35% figure you’ve quoted is for all adults, not specifically pensioners. The Health Survey for England breaks down obesity by age, and older adults consistently have lower obesity rates than middle‑aged adults. Childhood obesity, meanwhile, is treated as a public‑health crisis precisely because it’s disproportionately high for that age group and rising fast.

So no - pensioners are not “statistically more obese than children” when you compare like‑for‑like age‑specific prevalence. That’s why your claim didn’t stack up.

And just to be clear: nobody was arguing that children shouldn’t get bus passes because of obesity. The point was that obesity isn’t a meaningful metric for transport policy in either group. You tried to counter that by introducing a statistic that doesn’t actually say what you think it does.

If the argument is that children need subsidised transport, then make that argument - it stands perfectly well on its own without misusing obesity data or trying to remove pensioners free travel.

Our DD went to a grammar school which was slightly further than the local school but involved dangerous fast roads with no pavements so walking wasn't an option. The local authority claimed we had chosen not to send her to the nearest school so weren't entitled to transport, even though the grammar school is a state school and offered as an option. I'm still miffed about it as some friends really struggled with the fares which weren't cheap.

No, that figure isn't for all adults. It's for those over 55 and younger than. 74. Most pensioners are under 75. 25% of people over 75 are obese. Still significantly higher than kids. Did you even read the data? Do you still insist that children don't have lower obesity levels than pensioners?

Yes they were arguing that. This is what the poster wrote:
Lets face it, with the increasing number of obese children, most of them could do with the extra exercise.
How is this not a poster suggesting that children shouldn't get free travel due to obesity levels?

You’re still comparing apples and oranges.

The figures you’re quoting (35% for 55–74 and 25% for 75+) are adult obesity rates, not “pensioner vs child” rates. Adult obesity is measured on a completely different scale to childhood obesity, and the Health Survey for England explicitly warns against direct comparison across age groups because the thresholds and health implications differ.

Childhood obesity sits at 15%, and is classed as a public‑health crisis because it is disproportionately high for that age group and rising fast. Older adults have higher raw percentages because adult obesity is measured differently and includes age‑related changes in body composition. That doesn’t mean “pensioners are more obese than children” in any meaningful or policy‑relevant sense.

So yes - I do insist that children have higher age‑specific obesity risk than pensioners, because that’s exactly what the data shows when interpreted correctly.

Not that this has any bearing on free travel but the OP is correct, according to the NHS 32 to 36 percent of pensioners are considered obese, whereas 15 per cent of 2 to 15 year olds are classed as obese.

No, Adult obesity is measured simply using a fixed Body Mass Index (BMI) threshold where a BMI of 30 or higher is considered obese. This is obviously a wildly inappropriate measure for children due to height differences so they use age- and sex-specific growth charts or percentiles (such as the UK-WHO growth charts or CDC growth curves), where a child falling at or above the 95th percentile is typically classified as living with obesity. These are thresholds that have been agreed by professionals for obesity and are medical definitions. Factually the percentage of pensioners that meet the medical definition of obese is higher than the percentage of children that meet the medical definition of obese. You are fudging facts to create a new age-specific obesity risk that isn't a scientific or medical measure at all but something you have fudged together without any statistics to back it up.

Direct comparisons between age groups is generally discouraged but even when you standardise the data sets as much as possible and use other sources of evidence such as BMI for older teenagers (the highest risk group amongst children) they have lower rates of obesity than pensioners.