Introduction: Home to School Transport policy changes consultation, 2024
We are required to publish our Home to School Transport policies so that parents and carers may take them into account when deciding which schools their children will apply for.
We have been reviewing our policies to make them clear, and easy to understand for people who are thinking about or applying for transport. We have also aligned our proposed changes with the Department for Education’s (DfE) revised guidance on Home to School Transport, which was published in June 2023. Read the full DfE revised guidance.
Providing school transport is expensive and the Council needs to reduce expenditure to ensure the Council can continue to fund other vital services such as social care and protecting vulnerable children. The proposed changes with the addition of an Independent Travel Training Scheme would reduce costs by approximately £93,000 every year and the changes to the Post-16 Travel policy would reduce costs by around £152,000 every year. Additional work is already ongoing to optimise routes to reduce costs also.
Taking on board feedback from parents about the need for greater clarity in the policies, we have worked in partnership with SNAP Parent Carer Forum and other key stakeholders, to review clarity and ease of understanding of the current Home to School Transport policies.
We are required to consult on proposed changes for a minimum of 30 days however, we want everyone to have a chance to read and understand the changes properly, so we are consulting for eight weeks between Wednesday 7 February 2024 and Wednesday 3 April 2024.
If the policy changes are agreed, we will honour existing commitments for transport. The revised policies will apply only to new applications for home to school transport. The new policies would be effective for in-year school applications from the start of 2024/2025 academic year and at the start of the 2025/26 academic year for new compulsory school transport applications and post-16 transport applications (this is the earliest possible change).