SCHOOL BUSES – ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN
It should be the safest journey of the day but for many children the journey to and from school is the most dangerous part of school life. Safety is a postcode lottery. Government is aware of the problems but lets children down by doing too little. There are loopholes in the law and confusion about where responsibility lies. Tragically, I know this from a close and bitter experience.
On 3 December 2002, a school bus careered off the road near my rural village in South Wales. It crashed through a wire fence and into a tree, resting at an angle of 45 degrees above an embankment in an open field. My daughter Bethan, 12, was thrown across the top deck and sustained minor injuries. Our neighbour Stuart Cunningham- Jones was sitting in the front upstairs seat and died as a result of the impact with the tree. Stuart, also 12, was in his first term at comprehensive – a bright and talented boy with everything to live for. Whilst we grieved for Stuart and his brave family, all of us knew that were it not for the tree there would have been many more deaths. As it was, 30 children were injured. They were rescued with the aid of two ladders brought by nearby workmen. These helped prop up the hanging bus and offered an emergency exit through broken windows for shocked and dazed pupils. I still cannot comprehend the trauma they endured.
Legal restrictions prevent us from discussing why the bus crashed, although every parent and child involved has their own opinion. Stuart was sitting upstairs whilst something on the lower deck happened to cause the driver to lose control. The Crown Prosecution Service decided that no criminal proceedings are appropriate, even though the local press reported that there was some horseplay among children on the lower deck. But something went wrong and I was forced to wrestle with the implications of my duty of care as a parent and my similar obligation as a Head in a different comprehensive.
I believe that what happened could have occurred on any school bus anywhere in the country. I am also convinced that the rules governing the transport of children to school need to be changed. The children on the bus were themselves the first to voice their concerns about the accident on the 6 o’clock network news and Welsh regional TV that night. They were unanimously shocked and angry. They had felt for months that the bus journey was unsafe. As parents we felt we needed to support their concerns and in January 2003 formed Stuarts Campaign for Better School Buses. We initially intended to keep our campaign at a very local level but soon realised we would make little impact unless we attempted to address the national picture – or in our case the national picture in Wales. Within weeks we had set up our own website and established a prominent voice in the South Wales media. As we explained our case we found all to readily, sympathetic echoes from around the country.
The bus that crashed in our village was a service bus on which the council had purchased 20 free places. However many other youngsters who did not qualify for free places are still dependent on the bus in what is a rural area with an unsafe walking route to school. The council argues that the walking route is technically safe. Using a narrow interpretation of the legislation, it carried out a risk assessment showing that it was possible for a child, accompanied by a parent, to walk almost three miles to school despite the fact that there is no continuous footpath along a road with a 60 mph limit. To strengthen its legal position, it built little concrete bunkers along the route, as step-offs for one or two pedestrians, ignoring the fact that, in practice, there would be over 50 youngsters walking the same road. There has been no consideration of safe routes within the terms of the most recent legislation. However, the LEA insisted that since the route could be walked, the three-mile limit would apply to free places. It then decided to rationalise its provision by buying places on a service bus for those few remaining children who did qualify.
Since it was a service bus it did not have seat belts. Nor could the number of passengers be properly controlled. Because the bus carries school pupils, the LEA allowed the contractor to load it with 3 children to 2 seats for all those children below 15. When the bus crashed, it was not legally overcrowded because some of the children had stayed behind to play music and sports fixtures. But most mornings before the accident, there had been upwards of 90 children on a 76-seater vehicle. My children and others had complained of pushing and misbehaviour on the lower deck. As parents, we felt the bus was ludicrously overcrowded – but the regulations said otherwise and our LEA provided transport at this minimum level of legal responsibility. As a Head serving in another LEA, I have for years been similarly concerned about obvious over-crowding on the buses serving my own comprehensive.
In the aftermath of this tragedy, Stuart’s Campaign began to investigate the immensely complex web of practice and procedure that controls the way that children are taken to school. We found a staggering degree of inequality and anomaly.
Since 1997, there have been different and better rules governing the transport of children within school or on school trips. On these occasions, pupils have to be conveyed in vehicles with seat belts, every child has to have a seat of their own and supervision has to be provided to a ratio of 1 adult to 20 children. But on the journey to and from school things are much less safe. Home-school buses and service buses are exempt from the 1997 regulations and the safety of children depends on where you live. Some LEAs insist on seat belts for all children. North Somerset is one example of good practice as are those authorities which introduced seat belts for younger pupils following a Northern Echo campaign last year. Other councils operate the 3 for 2 rule and therefore condone overcrowding and the impossibility of providing each child with a belt.
Technically, LEAs are entitled to use “3 for 2” to lower costs but are they properly exercising their duty of care? Is a school properly exercising its similar duty when it allows a school bus leave with children sitting three to a double seat or standing? The regulation was written some 50 years ago and children today are a lot bigger due to better nutrition and diet. They also take more equipment in bigger bags to school. In practice pupils have to stand on the journey, sit on laps or fight for space on crowded seats.
When pupils stand and where belts are not used, youngsters are more likely to misbehave. They are free to move up and down the bus. A recent Department for Transport document recognises that across the UK children push, bully, interfere with drivers, engage in dangerous horseplay, vandalise and even deliberately rush from side to side on the upper deck in order to get the bus to sway. Put these examples together and the number of opportunities for distracting the driver multiplies alarmingly.
We normally control rogue behaviours through supervision. Most home-school buses are unsupervised. Where else would we crowd almost 100 youngsters into a confined space and leave them without adult control for up to an hour? In law, the driver is supposed to manage passenger behaviour but how can s/he do so when s/he is supposed to be driving the bus? Drivers themselves are concerned about the challenging circumstances they face.
Again, responses to this problem vary across the country. Some LEAs, like my own in Caerphilly County Borough, provide escorts for young pupils under 8. Others pay for supervisors on troublesome routes or run pupil monitoring schemes. There are difficulties in running these but on problem routes they can work, as Willows High School in Cardiff found after it paid for an escort from its own budget. Using new technology can be another solution. CCTV video surveillance is proving useful in bringing problem situations under control on both school and service buses.
Some LEAs rely on written protocols to manage pupil behaviour and contract performance. Some of these contend that parents are responsible for their children’s behaviour. The legal validity of that claim is questionable however because of the supremacy of the duty of care. In any event, in our locality the document was not issued to parents. How can I know my responsibilities as a parent if I am not told? Without the active intervention of the school and LEA, how can I modify the behaviour of other parents’ children? Cost and administrative inertia often prevent these protocols from being issued regularly or consistently. They should be issued annually at least and the relevant essentials included in the Authority’s Admissions Document.
Managing and monitoring pupil behaviour on the school run depends on an active and co-operative partnership between parents, LEAs and schools. Where adults try to pass the buck around the system, they create loopholes of accountability from which tragedy and grief can too often flow. In areas where budgets are especially tight it is tempting to fall back on minimum levels of responsibility and minimum levels of accountability. Does the corporate duty of care extend beyond that? Since few people can answer that question, there’s a need for something to be done.
The bus that crashed was technically sound but the UK Transport Commissioner has been warning for several years about the poor quality of vehicles used on the school run. Contractors often use the worst buses in the fleet, arguing that children damage the buses so they dare not put on quality vehicles. This, however, is a function of the price of the contract. Cash-starved LEAs issue tenders with insufficient quality factors. Lowest price tendering squeezes good-quality providers out of the market. Spot-checks by the police are inadequate in number and can easily be circumvented by the use of mobile phones, itself a hazard, while the MOT test certifies fitness on only one day of the year. In a recent check in South Wales, 1 in 5 school buses were found to have serious faults.
In many places, children are taken to school in old bangers. In other areas LEAs insist on better quality, as in Wrexham, which is piloting the use of American-style buses, a safer though not perfect alternative. Again the lottery applies. Our children deserve better. So what can be done about it?
NAHT Conference has called for tighter regulation of school bus transport. Following a meeting with Stuart’s parents, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales has taken an interest in the problem as has the National Assembly for Wales. The Welsh Local Government Association has also promised a review. Safer common practice may result in Wales. In Northern Ireland, the suspended Assembly wanted to ban standing on any school bus including public buses serving school runs. It is also committed to a seat and seat belt for each child. The Irish have given a model for all our governments.
UK law needs to be changed. The 3 for 2 regulations should go. The 1997 legislation insisting on seat belts should be extended to all buses carrying children in large numbers. Feasibility and manageability assessments would need to be made and implementation staggered to give the industry time to comply. But a commitment should be made soon.
Other local campaigns could mirror ours in South Wales or that run by the Northern Echo last year. Sensible minds can see through the clap-trap that goes with clapped-out buses and clamped-down spending. If we are to be true to our children, we need to help them get their voice heard.
This article was written by Dr Chris Howard, Head of Lewis School, Pengam in South Wales, President of NAHT Cymru, and Chair of Stuart’s Campaign for Safer School Buses.