Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I am replying on behalf of my colleague, the Minister of State at the Department of Education and Skills, Deputy Ciarán Cannon, who has responsibility for school transport among other things. I thank the Deputy for raising this matter as it provides me with an opportunity to outline the general position regarding school transport services.

School transport is a very significant national operation involving the transportation of more than 123,000 children each day to primary and post-primary schools, including more than 8,000 children with special educational needs. Furthermore, it involves approximately 42 million journeys and more than 82 million km on 6,000 routes every school year. These services are delivered using a mix of Bus Éireann, both school transport and road passenger vehicles, private contractor vehicles, including private operator scheduled services, and Dublin Bus, Irish Rail, DART and Luas where practicable.

The Deputy will be aware that the value for money review of the school transport schemes, which was published last March, considered a number of possible approaches through which the State can seek to support school transport in line with the overall objectives of the scheme. The report concluded that, particularly in the context of complexities of deciding on eligibility for school transport, procuring school transport and developing networks for school transport, a single national organiser with a regional dimension to operate the scheme is required.

The report further concluded that in the medium term the single national organiser should continue to be Bus Éireann. Bus Éireann is well placed to offer the possibility of integrating local transport services with the rural transport network to achieve significant economies of scale and the organisation and administration of school transport scheme services offers a successful model to follow and build upon.

The Department is co-operating fully in the development of practical initiatives, led by the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, to promote co-ordination of State supported transport services such as school transport, rural transport and the Health Service Executive transport services. Bus Éireann is also involved in this process. The Minister's priority is not only to ensure optimum efficiency and effectiveness between all programmes which receive State support, including school transport which, with a budget of €180 million is a significant area of expenditure, but also to establish how this work can assist in meeting the €17 million savings target in respect of the school transport budget by 2014.

The safety of school children, travelling on school transport services is of paramount importance to the Department and Bus Éireann. Not only does the company plan and manage the countrywide network applying a range of safety checks, it places onerous obligations and standards on contractors, drivers and vehicles used on school transport services, including the arrangement of random vehicle checks and maintenance audits conducted by independent experts, and the assessment of all routes and pick up points for suitability. In addition, the company assesses pupil eligibility, collects and accounts for pupil contributions, issues tickets or passes to pupils and provides day-to-day supervision and monitoring of service performance and standards. The company also manages the vetting of all personnel involved in school transport duties in conjunction with the Garda Síochána central vetting unit.

Given the practical issues which need to be undertaken, the reality is that it would not be possible or feasible for school managements, nor indeed would they have the expertise required, to assume the role of deciding on eligibility and procuring school transport on top of fulfilling their key roles in ensuring the education of each child.

In acknowledging our existing resource constraints, it is more important than ever that we streamline our processes and procedures to the greatest extent possible and help ease the administrative burden on schools. I again thank the Deputy for raising this matter and I will bring it to the attention of the Minister of State, Deputy Cannon.

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