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Education and Skills Bill

Every year I have the pleasure of receiving some work shadow students from Greenhead College in Huddersfield. We were having a discussion on school transport and they told me that the problem they face, which may well be illustrative of the problem many people will face when 16-to-18 education becomes compulsory—particularly when children have to get to educational and vocational opportunities which may be some distance from them—is that although transport arrangements are well organised within a particular district, once you try to travel between districts you get into considerable difficulties. In somewhere quite populous such as the outskirts of Manchester, where the districts are tightly drawn, if you are the wrong side of the boundary you find yourself unable to get free travel to Greenhead, whereas if you are within the right transport district, you do. This practice has grown up as arrangements have been made locally between local authorities and transport providers, and the boundaries are quite strict. Why should the outskirts of Manchester provide transport to Huddersfield when it is out of area, as it were? I think this has come about because the entitlement is phrased not as a right of the student to have transport to the proper provision but as a right of the ability of the authorities to co-operate in any way they choose to provide transport. Although for sixth-form students it is only a reduction in price rather than free, it is none the less important to children of that age and to their ability to take advantage of the educational opportunity they find best. We need to find some way of focusing the entitlement on the student, rather than for it to be subject to convenience and arrangements that have not been put in place between local authorities.