Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Minister for Education and Skills, for coming to the House to join in what I hope will be a constructive debate on rural school transport. I am more than aware of the cost of rural school transport but I am also aware of its importance. I also know that we were forced to change the rules on school transport in the budget for 2011 due to the financial situation in which the country finds itself.

As the Minister is aware, the school transport system as we know it dates back many years to its introduction in the 1960s. The way it operates is that a pupil, who, depending on his or her age, is a certain fixed distance from the school, gets free transport. Up to now that transport was provided as long as there were seven pupils on the bus route. In recent years we reduced it from three miles to two miles for the younger cohort and made it one seat for one student. They were two very expensive changes, but very good changes. After two major steps forward, the budget introduced one step back, which was the requirement to have ten students on a bus route before a service will be provided. The reality is that this change will predominantly affect small rural schools with two or three teachers.

I believe we should consider a different way of providing the same service at the same cost to the Exchequer. In other words, there can be a win-win situation if we get our head around it. I propose that on a pilot basis and on a voluntary basis, small rural schools could apply to the Minister to get a block grant that would be approximately equivalent to the remote area grant the Department pays for the students who are too far away from the school and are entitled to free transport but are not on the school run. That would be added to the cost of the current arrangement for that school with the savings that were built in and the Department would agree to give that as a lump sum to the school. It would administer that fund, but schools would not do it on their own.

At the moment the scheme is run by the Department of Education and Skills and Bus Éireann, and it is all very rigid and fixed. In this way the parents, school management and the companies that provide the rural transport service generally would get together and regard it as an adjunct to the rural transport service in their area. With that money they would set about creating a service designed by the school management and parents, and delivered by the school in conjunction with the rural transport companies. I suggest this be done on a pilot basis with no school being forced into this new arrangement. Knowing the fabric and attitudes of rural areas, I have no doubt that kind of self-help approach would be taken up in quite a number of the more rural areas where it is much easier to do but where the problem is now much more acute for the Minister.

This is not a major problem in the big schools in the peri-urban areas. This problem is most acute for the very small schools, but their strength is knowledge of their people, co-ordination and their ability to get things done. If this proposal is accepted, we could get a win-win in the situation in which we find ourselves. We could make the savings and provide an even better service that works well and is utterly to the satisfaction of the parents and teachers in the school. I would not suggest this if we did not have rural transport companies that know the game, know how to tender, know how to do their work and have experience in this area. Many of these rural transport companies provide a service to the elderly in the middle of the morning. They could reorganise their business so that they are free at school times. I suggest we should start doing this with the small national schools and I believe we would get the synergies. When we were in government, some pilot work was done between the HSE and the rural transport companies. I had been very anxious that this would proceed much faster than it did. Even if the Minister cannot give me a positive response, I hope he will seriously consider implementing this on a pilot basis to see if it can work and become the new template.

For many years we were told that only the Department of Education and Skills could design and do all the background work for small schools. Parents used to come to us and ask that they just be given the money and they would do it cheaper and better. There was enormous resistance to this devolving of power to local boards of management. It was the best thing that ever hit rural schools.

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