Environment and roads

Transport for 11 to 16 year olds

Information on help with home to school transport can be found by following the links at the bottom of this page.

Free transport

Only a small number of children qualify for free home-to-school transport. Free transport usually means a free bus pass.

Please remember the following:

• This policy applies to young people who live in the administrative county of Hertfordshire. If your child does not live in Hertfordshire, you should contact your own local education authority for details of their transport policy.
• Some children who have a place at a school that their brother or sister goes to at the time they join the school will receive free transport or help with transport costs.

We will provide free transport for the following groups:

• We will provide free transport for all children at their nearest suitable school or educational placement where the distance from home to school is more than three miles for children aged eight and over. This applies whether or not you have ranked the school on your secondary transfer form. The phrase "nearest suitable school" refers to the nearest available maintained school with places in the correct age range. This can be co-educational or single-sex. You should not confuse it with your preference for a particular school.
• We will provide free transport for all children at their nearest suitable school if it would not be safe for the child, accompanied as necessary, to walk with reasonable safety to school. This applies whether or not you have ranked the school on your secondary transfer form.
• We will provide free transport for all children at their nearest maintained faith school if they have a place for denominational reasons in line with their parent's beliefs. This applies to children aged eight or over where the distance from home to school:
• is between 3 and 15 miles; or
• is more than 15 miles and involves a journey of 75 minutes or less.

The following conditions also apply to free transport to faith (denominational) schools.

• For Church of England schools, your child must be baptised into the Church of England or you must be on the parish electoral register.
• For Roman Catholic schools, your child must have been baptised as a Roman Catholic.
• For Jewish schools, you must be a member of a synagogue community.

We will provide free transport for children with a Statement of Special Educational Needs that says that they need free transport.

Spare seats on school vehicles are now known as 'assisted transport' but used to be known as 'grace and favour' seats. Sometimes there may be spare seats on the vehicles we provide to take children who receive free transport to and from school. We normally offer these spare places at a cost to children who are not entitled to free transport. We do this for one term at a time.

No-one is automatically entitled to these places, so we cannot guarantee that a child will keep a place for longer than a term. This is because we only provide vehicles for those who are entitled to free transport.

We offer spare seats to those who ask for them in the following order:

1. We offer seats to pupils who have already had spare seats.
2. We offer seats to brothers and sisters of children who receive free transport.
3. We offer seats to brothers and sisters of children who already have spare seats.
4. We offer seats to children whose parents are claiming:
• Income Support or Income-Based Jobseeker’s Allowance;
• Child Tax Credit (income less than £14,155 and not receiving Working Tax Credit or payable at a rate higher than the family element, i.e. more than £545.34 - or £1,090.68 if you also have a child under one year old);
• Housing Benefit;
• Council Tax Benefit (not including single adult rebate); or
• Working Tax Credit.
5. We offer seats to children from areas where there are no public transport services.
6. We offer seats according to age, with the eldest first.

Charges

These apply to:

• assisted transport; and
• transport for students aged 16 to 18.

If you are in your final year of GCSEs you may want to use the 16-19 Transport link on the right for details of help with travel once you leave compulsory education.