Should children be taught how to use public transport at school?

pdq said:

However, it's quite feasible that many parents' last experience of a train was that it's always normal to be able to pay the conductor onboard. Passing that 'knowledge' to their children will cause more harm than good. Therefore, teaching in school is eminently sensible.

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And when a schoolkid gets a PF or TIR and tells their parents they did what the teacher told them?

Apart from it being absolutely a basic part of parenting, its a potential minefield of claims against the school

South Yorkshire had a scheme called 'Crucial Crew' where we went and learned about personal safety, journey planning etc.


Worked well as the nearest comprehensive school was a bus ride or two away from where I grew up, whether that be public transport or school buses. We all got free passes so didnt have to pay the 40p single as it was back then, but nevertheless it was probably helpful looking back.

I wouldn't say I wholly disagree with the idea.

But I do find schools are becoming the go-to for a lot of things which east into regular curriculum time.

Things I've seen campaigned for schools to teach:

• First aid
• Sex education
• Teeth brushing
• Finance
• Sign language
• Healthy sleeping
• Identifying fake news
• Participating in market research
• Pensions
• Taking public transport
• Etc

I get that a lot of these can be simple 1 hour lessons, but I do sometimes feel a bit skeptical about just adding more topics into PSHE lessons. Without skipping other topics, or increasing the length of the school day, not everything can be packed into compact lessons, and arguably those topics which can be condensed are topics which pupils could learn about in other ways.

I'm aware of a teenager with learning difficulties who struggles with public transport, and there's a case there about SEN provision for life skills, but I volunteer with children as young as 10 and we do take public transport to events and I'm yet to meet one who hasn't worked out how to do it. That's not to counter @yorkie's point about some children missing out; I just wonder what the scale of this actually is. If anything, I would expect those from lower socio-economic backgrounds to be more familiar with things like buses and cycling, maybe less so with trains, because owning and running a car is expensive.

styles said:

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I'm aware of a teenager with learning difficulties who struggles with public transport, and there's a case there about SEN provision for life skills, but I volunteer with children as young as 10 and we do take public transport to events and I'm yet to meet one who hasn't worked out how to do it. That's not to counter @yorkie's point about some children missing out; I just wonder what the scale of this actually is. If anything, I would expect those from lower socio-economic backgrounds to be more familiar with things like buses and cycling, maybe less so with trains, because owning and running a car is expensive.

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I would suggest that there are some from 'lower socio economic backgrounds' who are wedded to cars and would never imagine getting a bus or train - at least if you are upper class and go up to town then you probably use the Tube

styles said:

I get that a lot of these can be simple 1 hour lessons, but I do sometimes feel a bit skeptical about just adding more topics into PSHE lessons. Without skipping other topics, or increasing the length of the school day, not everything can be packed into compact lessons, and arguably those topics which can be condensed are topics which pupils could learn about in other ways.

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As someone who has tried to plan a coherent PSH(E)E [at one point it was Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education] I fully agree. There isn't enough time in the curriculum to deliver everything properly. You end up shoehorning things together that don't really fit, or it gets a one off lesson. Often PSHE is delivered by a random assortment of teachers who's specialisms are elsewhere, so it doesn't always have the impact you want.

There appears (as @styles has alluded) to be a trend of anything that needs to be 'taught' needing to be done so by school. Historically this has never been the case. Education happens both formally and informally in many different settings. 'Society' or the 'village' provided these through different organisations and media.

bahnause said:

The ‘public transport’ lesson was a given for us. As our school trips always involved public transport, we took the opportunity to let the class plan the journey themselves under the teacher’s supervision. Back then, of course, we still used the printed timetable. I can remember how the whole class (having given the ticket clerk a heads-up) rushed to the ticket counter at the station, where we were then told about all the options available.

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GarethC said:

Speaking as a secondary school teacher, I agree with the other posters who have said that accessing and using public transport is a key part of parenting, not something to be taught in schools. Where schools can help, this can be through experiences rather than through explicit lessons.

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I agree with the "experience" part. I once had a class from Ysgol Dolwyddelan (a small village primary) board for a cricket tournament in Llanrwst. There wasn't really any "teaching", the ticketing discussion (TfW's free accompanied child concessions) took place just between me and the group leader), but the simple activity of travelling by train to get somewhere makes it a bit more familiar and will encourage use later in life.

Krokodil said:

I agree with the "experience" part. I once had a class from Ysgol Dolwyddelan (a small village primary) board for a cricket tournament in Llanrwst. There wasn't really any "teaching", the ticketing discussion (TfW's free accompanied child concessions) took place just between me and the group leader), but the simple activity of travelling by train to get somewhere makes it a bit more familiar and will encourage use later in life.

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Though I think this highlights another issue with adding it to trying to shoehorn it in. If it's just naturally part of an activity, the pupils get to actually do it. If it's to fit into an hour's PSHE lesson in the middle of the school day, is it really feasible to take pupils down to a bus stop, get them all to buy a ticket/scan their pass on the bus, travel a couple of stops to see how to know where to get off, wait for a return bus in the opposite direction, do the same again, etc? With catching a train, getting a class of 30 children to buy a ticket somehow and the scheduling of the train services would be even more challenging, except perhaps those whose school is outside an Underground station somewhere fairly central. Doing it in a classroom would be half-baking it.

The young people I volunteer with do travel by public transport at times and as a result they naturally learn how to do it, but I would shy away from specifically encouraging groups to go out of their way to teach it as it's not practical, or at least, there's a thousand other things they'd be better spending their time doing.

This thread was a spinoff from a discussion regarding railway ticket complexity and fare evasion though. Bringing it back to that, the fares system for GB rail is so complex that the forum occassionally runs fares workshops which take longer than a PSHE session would and cover reasonably advanced topics. That many of the advanced fare topics even exist is more likely to be a problem for people making their first rail journey than the fact that buying a ticket and boarding a train isn't taught in schools. And for those living in Wick, you'd have to explain why their national operator's mobile app requires you to search for WCK instead of Wick, because if you search for Wick, none of the results shown are indeed for Wick.

I klearned how to use a bus when i was six. My mother used to take me to school on the bus, but let me buy the tickets from the conductor (with her money of course!). At that age I thought that was a huge privilege.

Puffing Devil said:

Parents?

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It's probably about 40 years too late for that, far too many of the current and upcoming generations of parents would barely have a clue themselves.

Some sort of social media collaboration with transport operators and popular "influencers" (cringe) would probably be more effective.