Does your child travel to school on a school bus?

[emsiewill]

My dd's travel to school on a school bus provided by the LEA. The reason a bus is provided is that they go to the only Welsh medium (ie everything is taught in Welsh) primary school in the area (about a 15 mile radius, I think).

I would be interested to hear of other people's experiences with LEA-provided transport. Many families at the school have had problems with the transport - the bus has sailed past our stop, with dd1 still on board many times, only to stop 100 yards down the road, and chuck her off onto the pavement without the driver even waiting to check that there was an adult around to meet her. Until this year, there were no escorts on the buses, only a driver to deal with up to 50 children, ranging in age from 4 - 11. The escorts that have been provided have no training (other than in behaviour management), the drivers have not yet all been police-checked, the LEA has no policy on what to do if there is no-one there to meet a child, as "it's a hard decision" (the council officer in charge of school transport said that), there is no list of who is on board the bus, no way for parents to contact the bus when en-route, no checking of who is meeting children from the bus, and they are late in the mornings about 25% of the time. This only covers about 25% of the issues that we have.

A group of parents have formed a committee, and we are trying to get the local authority to take its responsibilities seriously, put some proper policies into place, and actually implement them, rather than just picking the bus company whose tender is the cheapest.

I was wondering if anyone else here uses local authority transport, and if so, what your experiences are. If your authority has some good policies, and makes sure that the bus companies follow them, then it would add more force to our arguments when we meet with the various councillors if we could present them with examples of the way it should be done

Sorry for the long post, hope this all makes some sort of sense. It's something I feel quite passionate about - after all, it's not many parents who put their 4 year old child on a bus on their own every day, and those of us who have to should be able to feel confident that they will get to and from school safely.

emsiewill, good for you. Sorry, no experience but you're right, they're not taking their responsibilties seriously and they should. Have you looked at the local authority website? Might be worth doing to see if any of their policies are there. If they are you could print them off and take them to your meeting. You might find there's a transport policy in which they've promised safe reliable school transport. I expect someone else will have more experience.

I am shocked how few regulations there seem to be to cover this. If children go out on a school trip, the journey seems to be very carefully controlled/monitored ... but buses TO school not so.

A friend's dd travels to school on the bus. One day when she was just 5, and had only been at school for a month or so, she got off at the wrong stop - one too early. The bus had no escort, and the driver left a tiny 5 yr-old at the side of an extremely busy road, with no adults in sight!

Fortunately a dinner lady soon came by and rescued her - but she was distraught, as was her mother waiting at the next stop to find her daughter not on the bus, and the driver unable to offer her any explanation as to where she was, whether she had not got on the bus at all ... etc!

My friend's son had a similar experience on his first day at secondary school. It was his first time ever on a school bus and when they arrived in the morning at school they were told to get the bus home at the same spot. Come evening, he got on the bus at that point as instructed and stayed on the bus until the last stop which was not at all familiar. It then turned out that he was on the wrong bus and by now was MILES from home on the completely wrong side of town. But was the driver helpful - was he heck? He just chucked this poor kid out on the side of the road and left him there. Luckily, the one other kid who got off at that stop took pity on him and brought him home. As you can imagine, my friend was frantic by the time he called and it took her a further hour to go and pick him up. She didn't seem to have much joy in reporting it either.

Oh dear, it looks like this is not just a problem in this area, then.

kmg, reading your story reminded me why this issue worries me so much. dd1 is 7, and quite aware of things like where to get off etc, but dd2 has no idea at all, and if she had been getting the bus on her own, I dread to think where she might have ended up.

Just the other day, the bus went past one little girl's stop, the one before ours. The children were all shouting "stop, stop", so he stopped about 100 yards before our stop, my 2 got off (no adult in sight, obviously), but the little girl whose stop had been missed didn't (obviously confused), and the bus carried on with her on it. As I was walking back to the previous stop to let her dad know what had happened, the bus came back, and let her off. She was distraught by this time.

Another time, the bus arrived from completely the wrong direction. When I asked dd1 what had happened, she said "James told the driver the wrong directions". James is in Y3. So that makes him 8 at the most. It really is horrendous.

Surely someone must have a good tale to tell?

my bro (8 years) goes to a RC primary which serves a massive rural catchment area. The school provides several local buses that parents pay for (as kids all live within 3 miles of the school) and these have a teacher/parent on, seatbelts etc. The LEA provides free transport for kids living more than 3 miles away. Some kids get individual taxis or parents claim petrol money. Kids who get free buses are often given a bus pass to use on regular service buses or have to share a bus with the senior school. The senior school bus has monitors etc. who seem to make sure that the littlies are ok but otherwise parents are expected to rely on the goodwill of the service bus driver.

This isn't much help, but we had a choice of schools and chose the school WITHOUT the bus in anticipation of these problems. I caught a tiny school bus aged 5 on country lanes and it was a frightening experience. One day, I opened the back door to get out at my home and a car was coming in the opposite direction. The door swung out into the car's path and the car bashed it back onto me. I was only bruised, but it could have been nasty.

Anyone else?

My son travels by LEA SEN transport. It's door to door so we don't have problems with being dropped off at the wrong place. However the buses are supposed to meet certain standards but on my sons one of the seat belts doesn't reel in or out properly andd a seat is ripped and taped up.Our bus driver and escort are nice but have no experience of SEN children which can cause mis-understanding. My friend says the SEN bus driver who picks up in her street is always shouting at the children to shut up.

If anyone's interested here is the reason we are concerned about safety on the school buses. We don't want one of our children to die or be seriously injured before the local authority agree to have properly trained escorts on every bus.

We've just heard that the teachers at the school no longer get on the buses to ensure the children have their seatbelts on. "this is now the responsibility of the escorts". That would be fine if there was an escort on every bus. I emailed the person responsible for school transport at the local council on Tuesday, and have had no response yet.

Crikey, I don't blame you for being concerned emsiewill. Let us know if you get anywhere won't you? It's all very well being told we should all use public transport and our cars less etc (my soapbox, see school run thread!) but we won't if it's not safe.