The Government should extend the criteria for free bus travel to school to require local authorities to provide travel to any school in whose catchment area the student lives, even if this is in another local authority area.
You may be interested in these active petitions
Our locally school funded bus route is to the nearest school as it is deemed the ‘nearest suitable school’. Yet it is out of county and we do not live in the catchment area.
Local authorities are not required to provide free bus travel to a catchment school if there is a ‘suitable school’ nearby, leaving parents having to pay hundreds of pounds a term for a private contract. Ours is not the only case, this can happen all over the country where the catchment school has no funded or council-provided bus transport because of what feels like a loophole.