Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of the Minister of State at the Department of Education and Skills, Deputy Halligan, I thank the Senator for raising this matter.

Before I address the specific issues raised, I shall provide a quick outline of the extent of the school transport service. School transport, as the Minister of State has already outlined, is a very significant operation managed by Bus Éireann on behalf of the Department of Education and Skills. In the 2018-19 school year, over 117,500 children, including over 13,000 children with special educational needs, were transported in over 5,000 vehicles on a daily basis to primary and post-primary schools throughout the country covering over 100 million km at a cost of over €200 million in 2018.

The purpose of the school transport scheme is, having regard to available resources, to support the transport to and from school of children who reside remote from their nearest school. Children are generally eligible for school transport if they satisfy the distance criteria and are attending their nearest school, as determined by the Department or Bus Éireann, having regard to ethos and language.

All children who are eligible for school transport and completed the application process on time have been accommodated on school transport services for the current 2019-20 school year. Children who are not eligible for school transport may apply for transport on a concessionary basis and are facilitated, where spare seats exist, after eligible children have been accommodated. Where the number of ineligible children exceeds the number of spare seats available, Bus Éireann allocates tickets using an agreed selection process. We use a lottery system, as already outlined by Senator Lombard.

Growth in numbers of children availing of special educational needs transport is a notable development in recent years. The cost of special educational needs transport has grown from €58 million in 2012 to over €106 million in 2018. The school transport provision for children with special educational needs now accounts for over 50% of the total cost of the scheme while catering for some 12% of the overall number of children transported.

Recently the Minister for Education and Skills sanctioned an additional €1 million for the school transport budget to allow for temporary alleviation measures to temporarily increase the capacity for concessionary seats on the post-primary scheme for the current school year. The cost of these measures has been given to those areas where there was a significant concentration of post-primary children who had paid on time for the 2019-20 school year and are attending their second closest school.

In October 2019, the Minister announced a review of the school transport scheme with a view to ensuring that funds are being spent in the most effective way to meet the objectives of the scheme. The terms of reference and scope of the review are being considered by officials in the Department right now. It is expected that a cross-departmental steering group led by the Department of Education and Skills will be established shortly to oversee the review. I fully expect that Members of the Oireachtas and, indeed, members of the public will be allowed to make submissions to that review.

On behalf of the Minister of State, Deputy Halligan, I thank the Senator for raising this matter and for affording me the opportunity to provide an outline of the extent of the school transport scheme and the upcoming review.