A senior North Yorkshire councillor has admitted that the authority’s controversial home-to-school transport policy contains “errors”.
Wharfedale Conservative councillor Richard Foster, executive member for managing our environment, said he hoped a post-implementation review would lead to the errors being addressed and exceptions to the policy being made in rural areas.
The new rules, which only provide free transport to a child’s nearest school, have been criticised by parents because it means families cannot get paid transport to catchment school if it is not their closest.
In some rural areas, a journey to a closer school can mean a trip over remote high ground, which can be unsafe, particularly in winter.
Councillor Andrew Murday, North Yorkshire Liberal Democrat councillor for the Pateley Bridge and Nidderdale division, spoke out against the policy change at a meeting of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority (YDNPA) today (TUESDAY).
The councillor, who like Cllr Foster is also a YDNPA member, said he had attended a recent public meeting in Kettlewell to discuss the impact of the policy change.
He added: “The result is, particularly in remote rural areas, that families are left with very little alternative but to send their children to schools by transport that’s really on routes that are unsuitable.
“The problem is this discourages young families from moving to these areas and a school like Kettlewell, which has been under threat in the past, I think it’s the only school left in Upper Wharfedale, will find itself over the next few years under greater threat.”
In response, Cllr Foster questioned why the issue was brought up at a meeting of the national park authority.
He added: “I think that through the policy implementation review, I am hopeful, I’m not confident, but I’m hopeful that some of these very remote isolated communities will be looked at as exceptions, because they are exceptions. I think we can all agree, really, they’re exceptions.”
The councillor said the policy was saving between £4m and £5m a year.
He added: “(School transport) has gone from £25m to nearly £50m so we need to actually look at how we deliver this budget and what we do with it.
“The idea that some parents basically choose which school they send their child to and we pay for the transport for that child, it can’t continue if you know what I mean.
“There have been errors in that policy, I would say, where the exceptions haven’t been looked at, and that is why we’re doing the review as we speak.”
A spokesperson for the School Transport Action Group, which was formed to fight the change, said Cllr Foster was “operating on pure wishful thinking”.
They added: “He was told that grammar schools would be excluded – they weren’t. Then he was told things would be sorted out in appeals – they weren’t.
“Now he’s saying it’ll be sorted by the delayed post-implementation review – it won’t be.
“He and his Conservative colleagues, who are all still backing this disastrous policy, need to wake up and smell the coffee.”
Good to read some public acknowledgement that errors have indeed been made, but this article barely scratches the surface of a shambolic policy change that is actively undermining access to education in rural North Yorkshire.
By rigidly applying distance-based mapping to determine eligibility, the policy ignores the lived reality of rural communities. In practice, it excludes children from shared, sustainable routes to their only catchment school, while advising parents to apply instead to their “nearest” school, often outside catchment and with no guaranteed place, simply to qualify for funded transport, sometimes by taxi at greater public expense.
While the financial pressures facing the NYCC are widely understood, cost-saving cannot come at the expense of fairness, sustainability, or access to education. The NYCC has a duty to interpret and apply the law reasonably, proportionately, and in line with its purpose, not in a way that produces perverse outcomes or undermines children’s right to education.
Exceptions must be built into the policy where it can be demonstrated that refusing transport to a catchment school increases costs and creates unsustainable burdens for working rural families. Necessary savings should be achieved through balanced, lawful decision-making, not through rigid interpretations that penalise those with the fewest practical alternatives.