Suffolk County Council withdraws school bus in first week of term without telling parents or the college
This year around ten students from Stradbroke, Fressingfield and Laxfield are attending Suffolk One. This is mainly due to the increasing lack of subject choice at the otherwise good nearby school sixth forms. The reducing choice of subjects is a consequence of funding cuts.
Suffolk One, Galloway Travel and Suffolk County Council have been working for around a year to secure transport to meet this increasing demand and finally in mid-August it was announced that the 114 bus would change its route and so students would be able to travel from Eye directly to Suffolk One.
Now this wasn’t ideal for any of our families as Eye is still some 20–30 minutes drive away but everyone pulled together and worked out a rota of parents to drive the students to Eye and bring them back each day.
The first day of term arrived and the bus was 30 minutes late arriving at Suffolk One meaning students were late to their first lessons. Same thing happened the next two days although it wasn’t quite so late.
One parent rang the operator Galloway to complain and was then informed that the bus was going to revert back to its old route on Monday 11th September and would no longer stop at Suffolk One in the morning but in town. Students could change to get to Suffolk One but would be half an hour late every day.
Galloway then sent this tweet:
I phoned Galloway and they told me they were doing this as a result of instructions from Suffolk County Council.
I then tried to contact Suffolk County Council but nobody was able to speak to me. Other parents had the same response and eventually I resorted to phoning the Portfolio Holder for Transport Cllr James Finch directly.
Once Cllr Finch was involved we did, to be fair, get a response from Suffolk County Council and I spoke at some length to a senior officer in transport.
During this whole process everyone seemed to want to blame someone else. Galloway (probably quote rightly) said they were just doing what SCC told them. SCC initially suggested that Suffolk One had announced the bus route before it was really ready.
I had to point out that a number of us were actually sold bus passes by Suffolk County Council with this route on it at the start of August. In fact we received an offer for our son of transport on this route on 17th July.
Transport seemed shocked by this and it transpired during the conversation that the school transport team and the people who commission the buses weren’t really talking to each other.
In fact they had decided to revert the 114 to its previous timetable two and a half weeks before the start of term but failed to tell parents or even Suffolk One.
There seems to have been two main reasons for this decision. Firstly the re-routing of the 114 caused a media storm as it was no longer stopping in a number of villages. Secondly the timetable didn’t really work and was probably never going to get our children to college on time.
Thankfully having spoken to SCC we have now been able to arrange a different route for students to get to Suffolk One using the 118 via Framlingham as a stop gap. Now we are having to drive to Framlingham to pick them up instead of Eye.
SCC have committed to reviewing the route this term with the aspiration of running a direct bus again from January. We have been told that this time the Council will work with parents and the College.
Suffolk County Council have let our children down. Far from raising the bar they have removed the floor from under them during their first week at sixth form. All of this has happened against the background of their review of home to school transport.
This would see the Council having nothing to do with Post 16 transport as it is not a “statutory duty”. Apparently commercial operators will provide the transport but having spoken to Galloway this week it seems they and other bus companies are struggling as it is and providing transport to isolated rural parts of Suffolk is never going to make anyone any money.
