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SSTS Student Transport Coordination Guidelines
Changing Needs
The School Student Transport Scheme (SSTS) is a key component of the NSW Government's commitment to supporting access to education for school-age students in NSW.
What was a comparatively straightforward task - getting school students from home to school and back again - has become increasingly complex.
A number of factors have affected the operation of the SSTS in recent years. These include:
- lifestyle changes, including smaller household sizes
- changed population demographics, with more people living on the Sydney fringe and Central Coast, and in the Newcastle and Illawarra areas
- increased requirements for after-school child care
- a requirement for flexibility when parents live separately
- increased choice of school
- changes in the delivery of education, including multi-campus schools and VET in schools
- students exercising choice in studying school subjects at TAFE.
Student Transport Coordination Guidelines
These guidelines aim to promote communication and information sharing between parents, students, schools and bus operators, particularly in establishing local arrangements. With cooperation, as far as is logistically possible, transport services funded by the SSTS will meet the changing local needs of schools and students.
The guidelines are not intended to be prescriptive. Rather, the Ministry of Transport strongly encourages parents, schools and bus operators to work within the spirit of the guidelines, and to use consultative measures that best suit local needs.
The NSW Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee Inquiry Into the SSTS
In its 2002 report on the SSTS, the NSW Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) recommended that schools, bus operators, parents and students - supported by their representative associations and government agencies - establish liaison arrangements to help them better understand each other's needs. This would facilitate consultation when establishing local arrangements that impact on student transport - like changing start and finish times, or varying bus routes and timetables. These guidelines are intended to commence and assist this process.
The SSTS Working Party
To assist information exchange and coordination, the Ministry of Transport has established the SSTS Working Party, with members from government, private and public sector educational authorities and the transport industry, to improve communication between groups involved in the SSTS.
Improving Communications
Each year over 600,000 school students receive SSTS passes and 90 per cent of these students travel by bus.
In order for the SSTS to operate as efficiently as possible, operators, schools, students and parents need to adopt a cooperative approach to negotiating logistical hurdles.
Issues for Schools
Schools, students and their parents have said they need:
- flexible, customer-focused services
- (Indeed, one of the most consistent complaints from the education sector is that a school's start and/or finish times can be dictated by bus routes and/or timetables.)
- reliable services that run on time
- assurance that students will be able to get to school, and home again in the afternoons, within a reasonable time of the school's first and last bells.
Issues for Operators
Bus operators - whether they provide regular commercial services or dedicated school bus services - frequently provide services to more than one school.
Bus operators conducting regular commercial services must provide services to the whole of the community. This includes school students travelling on the SSTS and other concession fares, commuters trying to get to work and other members of the general public.
Bus operators said they find it difficult when schools make changes to start and finish times without giving them sufficient notice, and without considering the impact on other service users, including other schools in the service area. They often face significant logistic constraints, such as traffic congestion or road conditions, and such changes may have unintended financial or timetable planning consequences.
Possible Approaches
The Ministry of Transport strongly encourages parents, schools and bus operators to use whatever consultative mechanisms - formal or informal - best suit local needs.
These could range from establishing a (more or less formal) local committee comprising representatives from schools, parent organisations and transport operators, to making phone and/or email contact with other schools and/or transport service providers on a needs basis. Schools and operators should give consideration to identifying SSTS contact officers to aid information exchange and coordination processes.
Schools that are registered to use the Ministry of Transport's SSTS reporting website can use the website to check which operators convey their students, and which other schools are also serviced by these operators within their contract areas. In this way, the school can readily identify who should be consulted about proposed changes.
Operators can similarly review their own records and information provided on the Ministry website to support consultation with schools when considering changes to bus routes and timetables.
Other Considerations
As the PAC pointed out, all parties need to consider the costs of changes to school hours or other policies that may impact on the travelling arrangements for school students.
Roles and Responsibilities
Everyone involved with the SSTS has a responsibility to make the SSTS work. As outlined in the SSTS A Manual for Schools (1.3 Mb PDF) and Bus Operators Manual (197 kb PDF), operators and schools must consult with each other to ensure the provision of an appropriate service.
Tried and Tested: One Approach That Worked
Tamworth Coaches and Tamworth Public School
Believing that children learn better before lunch than they do after lunch, Tamworth Public School advised Tamworth Coaches that they would be finishing school 30 minutes earlier each afternoon.
After advising the school that, in a network of 29 schools, the company could not accommodate the change, Tamworth Coaches managed to come up with a solution. The company found that it could reschedule buses to arrive 15 minutes earlier in the morning and in the afternoon. This not only fitted with their own scheduling but, with the exception of one bus each afternoon, could also be accommodated by the other three non-commercial operators that serviced the school.
In the spirit of cooperation, the school then agreed to provide supervision for the one bus load of children who had to wait in the afternoon for the single non-commercial bus that was not able to fit in with the scheduling change.
How to Ensure Consultation Works
Most issues should be able to be satisfactorily resolved at local level - especially when all parties are committed to finding an outcome that works for everyone.
However, if the issue is not easily resolved, schools and operators are encouraged to involve their representative organisations - in the case of schools, the Department of Education and Training, the Catholic Education Commission and the Association of Independent Schools. As members of the SSTS Working Party, these organisations are well placed to share information about the ways in which other members may have overcome similar obstacles. They are also in a position to bring issues that may need further policy consideration to the attention of the SSTS Working Party.
Feedback and Comments
The Ministry of Transport welcomes feedback on the operation of these guidelines, including suggestions for improvement. More comprehensive information, including further examples of cooperation between schools and operators, may be found on the Ministry's website.
School Student Transport Scheme
Ministry of Transport
GPO Box 1620
Sydney NSW 2000
Telephone: (02) 9268 2800
August 2003
