Dwarfer1979
Member
Not it isn't, not even close. The cost of a bus and driver is several hundred pounds a day (unless you happen to have one of both sat around normally doing nothing anyway just in case which is very unlikely) and in my experience there aren't any meetings about these sort of issues. Unless you run normally with excess spares then you need an extra vehicle in the fleet (so after buying/renting it you have insurance, tax & maintenance costs to cover) whilst for most operators you will have to pay someone a full shifts pay to cover that (so something between £120 & £200 depending on your wage rate plus employer contribution taxes like NI unless you have some sort of part time agreement as there are minimum paid time agreements) unless you take out your supervisory/management cover at the very points in the day when they are most important to be on call to address issues.
Most schools are very hands off over school transport (unless they are running the contract themselves) and unless the council have funding available there is very little interaction with them once they check you are running the contracted vehicle size so there aren't a lot of meetings around these sort of issues. It is reported by the customer services function (who are the ones writing letters to parents so not expensive) and after a quick resourcing review between schedules, operations & management which can be done largely via e-mail either something happens or it doesn't. After that it is just responding explaining the situation in a standard format every time anyone contacts you.
Communication could be better, we had a council once who issued about 60 student passes for what was at the time a commercial bus service that ran under a low bridge meaning none of our double-deckers would go under it and didn't tell us until November how many passes had been issued (and as a commercial service we had significant season ticket sales of our own) - and even then got it wrong as they included a number for another operators service on our initial list meaning they told us there were 90!
One of the issues that does come up is that with current registration timescales doesn't work with the education planning timescales. Technically operators need to be making decisions around changing registrations for the start of the new school year in September by the end of June (and the firm deadline of 6 weeks to avoid short-notice applications around which the TCs are tightening up is mid-July) whilst schools often don't know their numbers until mid-August (and of course they won't know how those students will travel). You may be surprised how late a lot of parents leave it before checking travel options for school, there are lots of parents who leave it until the week before the school starts to try and find a bus (and often find there isn't one) and before the rise of mobile based ticketing the number of parents who bought their tickets one or two days before the start of term and then complained that we couldn't post the paper ticket to them ready for their kid to go back the next day was shocking. Often the first point an operator of a normal bus service knows what the loadings will be like for the school year is the first day back by which time it is often too late to do anything meaningful. The system of travel to school doesn't work but it is rarely something that the operator can control or influence until much too late to be able to do anything about it (particularly with current £2/£3 fare caps where often even student season tickets on longer school trips can be more than paying per trip so you don't even get a full picture of season ticket sales in advance on normal service buses.