John Halligan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

That would be difficult. Legally, we are not in a position to question parents about why their children are not taking up places on a bus or to question schools about whether a particular child is attending that school, which would mean they would have to take up a place on the bus. We also are not in a position to question the children. A review is under way in respect of the 18% who are not talking up places, which when completed will help us a lot.

Overall, 117,000 are being transported to and from school on a daily basis, including 13,000 children with special needs. The scheme is successful. I am not suggesting that there are not cracks in the system. Do children fall through the cracks? Yes, of course they do. I admit that emails are overlooked and mistakes are made which should be rectified sooner. I am not suggesting that everything is perfect with the scheme but 99% of those availing of the scheme think it is an excellent scheme. Since becoming Minister of State, I have endeavoured to ensure there has been no increase in the cost of this scheme, at detriment to myself in terms of my budget allocation each year. The independent value for money review showed that the amount paid by families for the school transport scheme would be four times greater if they had to drive their children to school. It is really good value.

My dilemma, and that of all other Ministers and Ministers of State, is that I am given a particular budget for the school transport scheme. The first priority is places on buses for special needs children. The second priority is places for eligible children. We then address the issue of concessionary places. This is not an easy task. As I said, only €15.4 million is paid by parents. The remainder of the cost is met by the State and it is increasing year on year. It was once remarked to me that the €190 million being spent on school transport would be better spent on replacement of prefabs and so on. I disagreed with that remark. I believe the school transport scheme is great. We need to continue to provide school transport for eligible children, including children with special needs. There have been two reviews of the scheme already. I have no problem with another review but it could recommend the provision of additional funding to provide for concessionary places. Currently, children who are not eligible under the scheme are awarded places on a concessionary basis. I will explain how this came about. When we provided buses for a particular village, town or city and those buses were 15-seat buses but there were only ten eligible children on board, we decided that rather than have the buses operating with ten empty seats we would allocate the remaining seats on a concessionary basis.

We put concessionaries on it. What happened was that concessionaries started at 700 and they are now at 24,700. The scheme is creaking at the edges and it means that every year we have to put millions of euros into the scheme to keep eligible children and children with special needs in it.

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