Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200
- 219)
WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2004
5 MAY 2004 MS
KATHRYN JAMES,
DR CHRIS
HOWARD, MRS
DOROTHY ELLIOTT,
MR MARTIN
WARD AND
MR TONY
NEAL
Q200 Valerie Davey: You raised an
interesting issue between what is a school bus as opposed to a
designated bus, where only children are being transported to school
or public transport on which children travel to school. I am wondering
as a group of people who are closely linked with parents and governors
and teachers at schools whether you feel the whole debate has
moved to a school bus being the yellow bus that we have heard
of earlier? Is that the way in which you think parental/teacher
involvement is moving? Can I ask Tony, is that your concept now
of school transport?
Mr Neal: I suppose my concept
of school transport is conditioned by where I am which is in a
very rural area where the transport largely is the school bus
(certainly what we have heard about yellow buses sounds attractive
and interesting. It goes back to the issues of safety and supervision
because—I am sorry to raise them again—the circumstances
that were being described in which that accident happened are
not unusual circumstances and, oddly, it is more difficult where
buses are designated as public transport buses. What is essentially
a school bus may be designated as a public service bus because
it is possible for other people to get on to it (it may be in
a rural area the only bus) the regulations there are less stringent
than they would be on a school bus, so we do have situations where
we have double decker buses with 70-80 pupils, substantial numbers
of them standing, and that is really not a terribly good state
of affairs.
Q201 Chairman: Where we are struggling
though is because what we are getting from witnesses so far is
not related to the Bill.
Mr Neal: Exactly, that is it.
Q202 Chairman: What is clear is what
you do not like about the Bill. Your view, unlike the first set
of witnesses, is you are saying we need a Bill but you are not
saying what you want in it, except presumably you want something
in terms of supervision and safety and security?
Mr Neal: Yes.
Mr Ward: This Bill does not address
the questions that we think are more important and that is what
we put in our written evidence to you. It is very disappointing
as a Bill to us because whilst the preamble, the document that
was issued last year addressed all the sorts of questions that
everybody earlier on was wanting to talk about as well, the Bill
is not doing that. All that the Bill is apparently doing is saying
we will deregulate to some extent, and that does not always mean
that authorities will be able to perform better, it may mean that
they will choose to perform worse. It is saying we will deregulate
in certain instances and we will allow for some degree of charging,
which seems quixotic to us. If you want to encourage people to
use buses, do not charge them for it.
Mrs Elliott: With the pilot schemes
the thing that comes out of that is good practice and that good
practice has got to be a disseminated across the country. The
danger with the pilots is when you have LEAs in one area operating
in one way and LEAs in another area operating in another way.
There has got to be some consistency. This is one thing that the
Bill might drive through. If I can come back to the one point
on how you monitor how any of these policies is working. I can
quote my own local authority Sunderland and in Sunderland the
authority works with the transport providers with the school buses
in training their drivers how to handle the children and also
how the children behave as well, and then they can monitor if
their strategies are successful in reducing the number of incidents
and getting their buses there on time, and in ensuring there are
no buses being taken off because of bad behaviour, and therefore
the public and the children are getting to school if it is the
school bus they are using.
Q203 Valerie Davey: One of the developments
from the earlier question is that therefore quite a number of
youngsters are already paying. It is a norm if you are on a public
bus, provided you are not getting some concession or other, you
are paying, and therefore how do you think parents will view this
concept that in fact even those who in the past have had some
free transport, if it was improved, would pay. Would they be willing
to pay or not? What do you think their feeling will be about payment
for transport?
Dr Howard: I think there is obviously
customer resistance to paying but it is my feeling based on our
particular case that if local authorities can have a genuinely
open discussion with parents and children about a better way of
getting to school that you may be able to come to some agreement
about some charging structure that is related to the particular
local circumstance, but in order for that to happen I think the
concept of an agreed safer route rather than a rigid three-mile
limit is absolutely essential. We were on the border of the three-mile
limit so some children had free transport and some did not. We
had a route to school that we had been arguing for six years was
not safe and the local authority said here is the three miles,
that is all we are doing, apart from a couple of minor things,
but they crucially did not take into account the view of parents,
which in my opinion was a very common sense view that it was impractical
and unreasonable to expect parents to walk an 11-year-old child
six miles every day down an A road through the countryside without
a continuous footpath. If a local authority has a debate with
parents that simply says there is the statutory limit that is
all we are doing, blame the regulations, blame the Government,
you will have a completely unproductive exercise. I think the
pilots do give that potential. If a local authority has a more
open debate and that is coupled with the identification of a safer
route then I think you may get somewhere, but I think you will
need to build into the Bill some mechanism by which parents and
children can insist that a route needs to be a walking route and
needs to be improved.
Q204 Chairman: Why on earth would
you want to abrogate the whole notion of local democracy? If you
live in an area that has a rotten local education authority or
a poor one or one that fails to provide a decent standard of service
in school transport then you have it in your hands to do something
about it, presumably. If you have an innovative and remarkable
local authority consortium, as we have in West Yorkshire, (and
you saw the yellow bus and all that innovative stuff and that
is what local democracy is) why do you want some central government
diktat to say everyone has got to have the same? Surely it is
great that in Cardiff you could have something, in Devon you could
have something different, and it is up to local people to vote
in elections if they do not get what they want?
Dr Howard: Of course it is, I
fully agree with the general concept. However, you have some areas
where the vote on the day is predicated on factors which have
something other than to do with general welfare. I am very glad
to live in one such area but that is the political reality of
it. What I am suggesting here is that you temper the local authority's
reaction to its electorate with some client-led information. In
a number of examples I think if parents are in a reasonably co-operative
dialogue and express by a large percentage of opinion a particular
view then a local authority should be made to take account of
that view because otherwise they will ignore it, they will just
put up a consultation on a notice board or go through some shadow
exercise and call it consultation but they will not engage properly
with parents. That is the reality of the situation.
Q205 Valerie Davey: But this is a
local argument for a particular set of parents. If you have got
one comprehensive in a rural area into which people are travelling
and over the years they will travel from the different villages,
the situation you are describing has some reality about it. If
you are talking about a situation where year-on-year youngsters
will go to different schools. We are in some difficulty. Mrs Elliott's
point almost polarises yours which says we have to have some consistency.
How do we marry your localised factors with Mrs Elliott's consistency?
Mrs Elliott: I think there needs
to be good integration between the school travel plans and education
facilities for the children. There has got to be some joined-up
thinking because if you go down parallel lines you are not going
to come to any consensus of moving forward. If you have some consistency
of thinking then you can get the correct transport issues for
your area, whether it be an unsafe route but it is under two miles
then you can do something about the route and things like that.
Q206 Valerie Davey: You come a bit
late for our admissions policy document but are you suggesting
transport and school admissions ought to have some link?
Mrs Elliott: I think, yes because
there are so many schools closing down and amalgamating, there
are specialist schools and parents do not want to send their child
to perhaps the school nearest to them or they cannot get their
child in. All these things come together so I think there has
got to be some rationale behind the admissions and the transport
policies and the school travel plans. A whole lot has got to be
thought through holistically instead of taking one little bit,
thinking that through, taking another bit and then finding that
in end we still have a problem.
Mr Neal: I wanted to respond to
Valerie's initial question about how will parents feel about it.
I respond from the context that 75-80% of my pupils live more
than three miles from school and fundamentally they would feel
it is grossly unfair that LEAs are being encouraged through the
Bill to charge those people who have least easy access to school
because of the distance in order essentially to subsidise those
who have most easy access because they are nearer, and it is just
as simple as that.
Q207 Valerie Davey: Thank you.
Ms James: I think there is potential
as well within the Bill. You asked whether we need a Bill. I think
there does need to be an element of deregulation allowed but as
long as there is also an insistence on a variety of pilots so
that it is not just a potential for LEAs to make money, dread
the thought, but there is a way that the various initiatives can
be tested. There does need to be (to pick up Dorothy's point)
generic consistency and there does need to be the safety issues
addressed, the various elements across the country, but then there
can be local flexibility within that as well, and I think that
addresses the issue of local democracy as well.
Q208 Chairman: Generic consistency
might worry some members of this Committee. Time and time again
we have people from your sort of background telling us that the
one thing that really irritates them about the whole education
sector is red tape and over-regulation. In a sense you are asking
for greater regulation, more rules, schools have to do this, meet
standards, and all in a situation where most people would say
the statistics show that very few children get hurt going to school
on school buses yet you are asking us for a parallel to the Dangerous
Dogs Act. A child gets mauled by a dog; we have a Dangerous Dogs
Act that has never worked and now you are asking us for some piece
of legislation that is going to protect children from something
that rarely happens.
Ms James: In fact, I would disagree
with that. What I am saying is that the regulation that is needed
is in fact not necessarily in terms of schools; what I am saying
is that we have already got outdated legislation that does not
allow for the consistency that is needed in terms of the safety
of school buses, for example. I am sorry, I am going back to the
safety issue, but the three children to two seats, which is an
issue that is prevalent within authorities, should no longer exist
and yet there does not seem to be any move or any view of a local
authority that this can be overcome where they currently use this.
That is the sort of consistency that I am talking about which
then allows for a local flexibility. We are sticking rigidly to
school buses here, but there are different ways, there are the
walking buses, the various initiatives that can come about, and
I think those are the things that I would wish to see which need
to be built into the Bill. With the deregulation comes the requirement
to look at different ways and to get some form of generic consistency
and local flexibility.
Mr Ward: If we are talking about
supervision that is not only a safety issue, it is also an amenity
issue and just because the school journey does not lead every
day to an accident, of course that is not the case, that is very
rare fortunately, it is still the case that on a daily basis it
is extremely unpleasant for many of those young people so they
therefore resist going on the bus. They would rather persuade
mum or dad to take them by car. Mum or dad may well agree to that.
I have found myself in that situation as a parent as well and
many another of us have I am sure. If those journeys can be made
not only safer but also more pleasant because they are calm and
they are in well-maintained and modern buses, then young people
will be more prepared to take them, and there are also educational
benefits because they will arrive at school in a better frame
of mind and ready for their education rather than arriving hyped
up.
Q209 Chairman: The Committee would
not disagree with this. It is our job to probe these issues. Chris
Howard, very quickly.
Dr Howard: It is the same point
but could I raise a tangential issue, that is if the pilots are
going to examine this issue of improving behaviour, in my opinion,
you also need to examine the issue of the duty of care and what
part each part of the partnership plays in determining who does
what, where and when. Our Association has been advised by the
DfE over many years that schools' responsibility for behaviour
on the buses stopped at the gate. My own practice over many years
has been really it did not because I could not afford it to. Daily
I was told of misbehaviour on buses which if I ignored I could
not square my conscience with if something happened. You will
get schools who say, "We are not having anything to do with
that. It happened on the bus, we are so advised, and we will not
do anything with it." There is a virtuous circle in which
I am afraid you could see a particularly tragic example. I see
it on a daily basis in my own operations, to be honest, and it
is this: the LEA contracts out the service on a dedicated bus
or it may purchase places on a fare-paying vehicle within a travel
plan but it is contracted out to a provider and the LEA then says
safety is the provider's domain. The provider in practice is split
between the driver, who may or may not report an incident, and
the transport manager, and the transport manager, if he or she
becomes aware of the incident, then has to decide what to do about
it. Invariably they will contact the school not the education
office because the school is seen to be the authoritative part
of the system. When schools are told about misbehaviour they do
react at school level but if it is persistent then the school
has to say to itself, "What then can I do about it?"
and school headteachers will often say, "It is not my responsibility
now, it is the Education Department's," but unless there
is a secure chain of reporting into the Education Department then
the appropriate authority, the LEA, may not know about the misbehaviour.
In other words, the misbehaviour has to be chronic and persistent
until the LEA is in a position where it is called upon to intervene
and then what does it do. Within South Wales for example there
are some LEAs who will say that a child is statutorily entitled
to free transport to school in any eventuality and whatever he
or she does on the way to school on a bus we cannot alter that,
so misbehave on the bus one day, you still travel on the bus the
next. Other authorities will try to remove the transport for a
day or a week or even longer in the same way that they might exclude
a pupil from school, but the legal ability to do that is unclear
and if challenged they would be in some difficulty. Chairman,
unless you can resolve (and I say this as a day-to-day practitioner
who has to deal with these things daily) where exactly the liability
lies, where exactly the responsibility lies, then you will not
be able to build a best practice model that is effective in delivering
children from home to school in safe circumstances.
Q210 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Mrs Elliott: Just referring to
my colleague's point of view here and to go back to what I
said about Sunderland, we address the problem of unsupervised
travel by looking at the issues and advising a code of practice
that is linked to the education, the pupils, the parents and the
transport providers, which they all signed up to, not actually
signing the document, but it was all signed up to and the drivers
said, "We do not know how to handle the children. We can
drive the bus but can someone give us some training?" We
questioned children and, believe you me, what they wanted to do
to have a safe journey you could not even put into practice legally
but they wanted a safe journey, a pleasant journey and something
they could enjoy and get them to school. Taking this all in all
there are things that local authorities can do themselves as well
as the legislation to have a safe journey, a pleasant journey
and get the kids to school, monitor what is happening, have consistent
reporting procedures from the transport people to the local authorities
to the schools. These are other things that can be done not necessarily
within this Bill.
Q211 Chairman: All this is excellent
stuff but, you are quite right, getting you to really focus on
the Bill is proving quite difficult. Tony?
Mr Neal: I am still not focusing
on the Bill. We have said what we have said about the Bill because
all the Bill provides for is charging and we have said what we
have said about that; there is no more to say.
Q212 Chairman: It would be nice for
you to say if you had a Bill what would be in it.
Mr Neal: And that is what we are
trying to explore. In relation to supervision I cannot think of
any other circumstance in which you would put together 70 or 80
adolescents in a very confined space without supervision for a
period of up to 45 or 50 minutes (in the case of my school) and
expect that to work adequately, and that is the demand we are
placing on school transport and, not surprisingly, it cannot cope
with that and the situation is getting worse. Those are the key
issues that need to be addressed by any Transport Bill and it
will cost and it will need to be funded.
Q213 Mr Turner: I was just checking
what the long title says and the long title says "to make
provision for school travel schemes and for connected purposes",
which seems to me you can put virtually anything connected with
getting a child to school into this Bill. I hope you will recommend
lots and lots of very clear amendments that we can make to this
Bill either now in what remains of the time available now or later.
Can I just ask what do you think is a reasonable time for a child
of five or 10 or even 16 to spend travelling to school each day?
Ms James: I presume what is lying
behind your question is the notion of the extended school and
the out-of-school activities and also in transport the school
bus issue in rural areas where you are picking up children over
a long distance—
Q214 Mr Turner:—Who in many
cases do not get to the bus until they are a mile from their home.
They walk a mile to the bus stop and then they spend an hour on
the bus. What is reasonable because I think that is where we need
to start?
Mrs Elliott: An hour to travel
to school to get there and an hour to get back, that is certainly
not reasonable because the child or young adult is going to be
tired before they get there to even start a day at school learning
and then they have to come back.
Q215 Mr Turner: That is what eight-year-olds
are doing in my constituency and I am sure in North Yorkshire
daily, so what is reasonable?
Mrs Elliott: The circumstances
are very much part of that equation. If the school is not there—
Chairman: I will remind Andrew, I think
he was at Slough when we took evidence—
Mr Turner:—I did not get there.
Chairman:—Where we found parents
who willingly signed up to send their children from Tottenham
to Slough every day on public transport because that is the school
they have chosen.
Q216 Mr Turner: We are thinking of
minimum statutory provision, are we not? What do you think is
reasonable for the state to say local authorities should provide
or demand that their parents and children do?
Ms James: I think it is a very,
very difficult question to answer because we are talking here
about rural schools. I do not think you should ignore the situation
of urban schools either. My own children, living in an outer London
Borough, travelled across the borough. That was the nature of
the secondary schools there were in and at age 11 they were having
to travel on public transport because there was no school bus
(in a not over-large outer London borough I might say) on three
different buses to get to school because of the routes that they
had to use and so some of the children locally were leaving at
about quarter past seven in the morning to get to school because
schools were starting at half past eight so they were putting
in an hour at the beginning of their day and that is in an urban
area and I do not think you can afford to forgot about that either.
Chairman: I am worried this is going
to be one of these arguments how long is a piece of string because
when we were in Birmingham many parents live on one side of Birmingham
but because they wanted an all-girls schools sent their children
miles.
Mr Turner: That is voluntary.
Chairman: I am worried, Andrew, that
we are not going to come to a definition of reasonableness. Have
another go.
Q217 Mr Turner: I think you are right
and I wish we could. Mr Ward seems to have an answer.
Mr Ward: I do not have an answer
to that question but I think where you are leading back to is
an issue that was raised in the earlier session and that is if
we want shorter journeys to school, if we want more to more children
to walk to school and cycle to school then we need more smaller
schools whereas our policy effectively over decades has been to
have fewer, larger schools further apart. Of course journeys will
be different in different circumstances. Some will be fortunate
to live next door to a school and others will not and some will
choose to make very long journeys. I used to be the principal
of a sixth form college and I had students at 16 who volunteered
to make journeys of an hour and a half or an hour and three-quarters
to get to the college because they wanted to but we could not
expect people to do that and I think that would be unreasonable.
As the Chairman says, how long a piece of string is is a bit difficult
to answer.
Mr Turner: I accept it was an unreasonable
question but I am glad I have had some answers.
Q218 Chairman: Tony, there is a good
rider to add do this question; do you agree with the Secretary
of State that what he would like this Bill to deliver is more
people going to neighbourhood schools? Should we be much tighter
about where they go to school?
Mr Neal: That is a separate issue
I am not prepared to be drawn into.
Q219 Chairman: I am sorry, Tony—
Mr Neal: Can I answer that last
question?
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