Any parents organised regular school minibus or coach transport before?

[BasementSlacks]

Has anyone done this and can share tips? From asking around we think there’s probably enough parents locally driving their DC long distances to the school and back who’s be interested to make it work. School are fine with us doing our own thing. Need to find a regular weekly insured driver plus minibus termtime only. Much much easier said than done, I’m sure! Then there’s the regular running of it. What do we need to know?

No, but following for tips!

How will this be funded? Upfront payment from parents? What happens if a child gets dropped from the team? Need to make it clear there are no refunds.

You can't have pay as you go
My ds' school uses a coach company and they have different size buses/coaches

Well a tip I was told is that some local authorities keep lists of local transport companies that schools can use to help them book more confidently for their own trips, so that’s a start- if parent groups can use those too?

Yes- I guess would need to be non refundable termly payments in advance, or annual if possible. I don’t want to be handling other people’s money as a parent organizer, so definitely looking for any tips on how others manage that side of it.

My dd’s school has a regular service which was arranged by a parent with a local coach company. The school helped by publicising it but the coach company actually run the scheme. They issue the passes and parents pay by monthly standing order direct to them.

That sounds ideal Honey. Hope we’ve got the numbers to keep a company interested in taking on the admin too. We’ve probably not got quite enough for a coachload yet.

Do you see any other school bus services about. Where I live there are loads for the various independent schools, so I would start by contacting one of them.

It does work out quite expensive though - DS uses one to school (11 miles away) small executive coach and the cost for the autumn term was £600! ( I don't think the coach is full at the moment - so that is about as expensive as it would get).

A local taxi company will probably have some larger vehicles? My DD gets a council-funded minibus to school as we're more than 3 miles away and it's a local taxi firm who provide it.

Thank you all these are really good suggestions. Will start phoning around and post anything useful back here.