School Bus Crashes

Sometimes it sucks to be right. Back in June 2011 I wrote to the Transport Services Group in Lincoln, part of the County Council, to express my concern about their proposed changes to home to school transport. They acknowledged my letter, but went ahead and did exactly what they had planned to do anyway.

Today I heard that my son's bus had crashed and ended up in a ditch.

My son was unhurt, but his driver had to be cut out of the vehicle and airlifted to Nottingham. I don't know how exactly how badly he was hurt. The escort, whose job is to ensure the pupils stay safe whilst they travel, broke her collarbone.

The bus was carrying pupils from Aegir Community School in Gainsborough, returning pupils as far as Louth, and it crashed near Market Rasen.

I was afraid this would happen

There's more to this story than a simple accident that could happen to anyone, however. At the start of this school year last September new changes came into force that meant my son's taxi route was merged with another as part of a shake-up of school transport. This is all about cutting costs, and it meant that instead of travelling in a taxi with up to four other pupils he would be in a minibus with seven children, taking a much more round-about route than before. This is what I wrote to the Transport Services Group:



So even then I suspected something like this would happen, purely because of the long distances involved. I feel very guilty for not having made more of a fuss about this before something awful happened. But most of all I blame the council for putting cost savings before pupil safety, and for failing to provide adequate school places for some of our most vulnerable children.

There's a BBC report of the incident.