Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. About 172,000 young people access the school transport scheme. Many of those are children with additional needs. The programme for Government sets out very clearly that we will expand the scheme even further. There is no set timeline, and the expansion has to be done across the lifetime of the current Government, but we have set a very clear target to ensure 100,000 more children will be able to access the scheme. In particular, that would mean removing the barrier that essentially forces young people to go to their nearest school or the school allocated to them. We want to remove the barrier to ensure children can attend, via the school transport scheme, the school they are attending already.

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