Four common bugbears around home-to-school transportation
Home-to-school transport is a complex area of local authority statutory responsibility, and we are frequently hearing of challenges surrounding the increasing costs, compliance, safety and indeed procurement.
There are far too frequent stories in the news of issues relating to home-to-school transportation, from lack of funding and increasing costs to issues around safety and procurement.
Following my years within this industry I wanted to draw upon the common bugbears and how a system like Flexiroute may be able to assist your council and or school network.
Firstly, Flexiroute is an end-to-end transport management system designed to offer considerable improvements to the entire process for councils, service users, guardians, carers, schools, and transport providers.
The dynamic, market leading system offers you a complaint system to help drive down costs and improve efficiency. The system has user-specific apps and provides integrated vehicle and user records.
There are many bugbears, or perhaps issues that a system can help mitigate and I will talk through some of the common ones now:
1. Efficiency
2. Compliance
Safeguarding children and young adults comes with elevated levels of compliance and risk management, therefore having a system which can take care of this provides a duty of care to passengers, parents, caregivers, and drivers.
3. Rising costs
With continually rising costs, it is vital that systems can prove return on investment and display efficient cost management. A purpose-built system can help reduce these rising costs but also help demonstrate a return on investment in terms of reporting. Route Optimisation is an immediate cost saver, by helping to find the most cost-effective route and provide real-time traffic updates – this can help contribute to reducing your carbon footprint.
4. Lack of visibility
Many organisations are using spreadsheets to manage their home-to-school transport needs which provides little visibility and room for error and issues. An electronic system helps improve visibility and provides traceability of vehicles and the children being transported.
These are just some of the most common bugbears we discuss with our customers on a regular basis. Flexiroute can help improve these bugbears and provide your organisation with a dynamic, digital end-to-end solution. We challenged ourselves to deliver game-changing technological solutions, facilitating meaningful improvement across communities nationwide, and we promise to keep doing exactly that.
