A safe pair of hands for school trips

There’s little doubt that school trips play a huge part in education outside of the classroom. I recall my first school trip on a coach from Belfast to the Giants Causeway. It was great fun and a day I still remember after forty-something years.
   
Today, I run BUSK, the independent organisation that aims to promote safe child road transport throughout the UK, specialising not only in all aspects of home to school transport, but also in school trips in the UK and school visits abroad. BUSK provide free services for parents and schools.

Understanding the industry
Some teacher unions have voiced concern about transport safety among teachers and group travel organisers responsible for organising school trips by coach. Certainly, the person organising this kind of transport needs to be aware of some key points.
   
A clear message for anyone hiring a coach is that a shiny livery on it’s side or a fabulous website doesn’t necessarily offer a guarantee that everything is operated safely, or that the coach company complies fully with the rules governing their license. 
   
A coach company must by law have an Operator’s License to operate. However, licensed companies cannot automatically be regarded as reputable. Assuming all is fine based on the license alone can result in hiring transport that may not be road worthy or driven by an employee of the transport company. The driver could be casual labour and not trained to a high standard that a company investing in its employed workforce would normally make.
   
BUSK increasingly finds that few schools understand how the coach industry operates. We have every sympathy with a school that’s trying to keep costs down, but schools cannot afford to ignore blatant warning signs such as really cheap quotes. Often expert and independent advice is available. We give free advice on a regular basis to anyone who’s unsure how to tell if the coach company they want to use is safety and legally compliant.

You get what you pay for
Cheap coach hire should always be challenged. Usually, if a coach company charges more it’s because it reflects the costs involved. The rate asked for will include costings that allow the operator to invest in training, technology, safety and updating the fleet. It is these operators that rarely have defective vehicles, or flout Drivers’ Hours Regulations. These regulations are there for a reason – to avoid drivers becoming tired and to keep everyone safe.
   
Policing all of this is the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA). Throughout the UK, the coaches are stopped by the DVSA and the Roads Policing Units to spot-check for legal compliance. Every year in the UK a significant number of coach operators are found to have defects in their vehicles. The list of defects includes rear emergency doors that won’t open, bald tyres, defective brakes and steering, and other serious problems that compromise safety and could contribute to a road traffic collision.

Simply Safe
In April 2012, BUSK introduced Simply Safe, a scheme aimed at coach and minibus operators who were keen to demonstrate that they were safety and legally compliant. Simply Safe members, and there are now more than 130, are listed on the BUSK website. Each operator will have had background checks carried out using DVSA Encounter Reports. These go back over the previous three years and include checks on an operator’s previous two year’s MOT pass rate on first presentation.
   
BUSK looks at the reasons for any failures. Other checks are made to see if the company has been called to a Public Inquiry and to ensure the company is of good repute. If necessary we will also ask for written and signed references from industry leaders. All of these checks will be carried out again after two years. Each month, BUSK randomly spot checks ten members. Stringent rules are in place to ensure that those companies listed on our website are monitored continuously.
   
It’s worth noting that some applications have been declined when the background checks that BUSK carries out have shown that they don’t meet the Simply Safe criteria. The good news is that almost all of those operators, who have chosen to invite BUSK in, have vowed to improve how they run their company. In most cases those operators reapply after 12 months, and some successfully achieve the accreditation.

Safety Charter
Each Simply Safe member has a page on BUSK’s website with a direct link to their own company website. When visiting a member’s website, a school could expect to find a Safety Charter listing what the operator guarantees to provide. However, and this is equally important, the Safety Charter will list what’s required from the hirer.
   
For example, an operator won’t want all the teachers to sit at the front of the coach. They will want two teachers to be seated by the rear emergency exit and to have familiarised themselves with how to operate it in the unlikely event that it may need to be used. This door is almost always going to be situated on the offside of the vehicle and could have traffic passing it. Pupils jumping out of the vehicle and into the line of traffic must be avoided at all costs.
   
Another document to be found on a Simply Safe’s member’s website is a company profile. This provides important and relevant information about the operator including the main contact; how many drivers they employ, both full and part time and what additional level of training they’ve had to undertake; if they’re experienced to drive abroad; what associations the company belongs to and what breakdown recovery systems are in place. Each operator will also state that they reinvest into their company because that is what they do as a matter of course, unlike the operator who fails to do and can therefore, well afford to offer cheap coach travel.
   
This level of information is still the exception in the industry, but through Simply Safe we’re getting more and more operators to recognise why it’s important. The information on the company profile prepared by BUSK can be used as a template by a school so they can ask for that same level of information from non-Simply Safe members when they request a quote for a school trip. This means the school can start to compare like with like instead of just comparing cost alone.

The best service
We regularly talk with schools and they often say that they’re obliged to choose the cheapest out of three quotes but this is not the case. National guidance says that schools must take into account quality and safety and not choose a coach company on cost alone. To hire on cost alone with no questions asked is just asking for trouble, in particular, should something go wrong. Legal advice sought on this issue by BUSK has indicated that a court would take a dim view of anyone hiring transport in this way because it demonstrates a lax attitude to the safety of children.
   
Earlier we told you that some companies are called to a Public Inquiry if stopped by the DVSA and found to be using defective vehicles or where the drivers have exceeded their hours for driving. The horrifying truth is that it could take up to six months between the time an operator is stopped and caught breaking the law, and the date for the Public Inquiry. During those six months, the company can still operate. Teachers could hire a coach from that operator and be unaware of the situation.

If they wish, hirers are able to look at the vehicle defect reporting systems, as well as driver walk-about-checks, the process carried out by a driver before a vehicle is driven from the depot to collect passengers. 
   
Another point to bear in mind is that if a teacher uses a tour company that organises transport, accommodation and ferry crossing, they can still stipulate their requirements. For example, the hirer can stipulate they want a Simply Safe member to be used so that the school can be sure they have been background checked.  Not all tour companies will have carried out these types of checks. If they say they have, ask for evidence because some will carry out audits on coach companies they use, but this is different from the type of checks BUSK makes on its members.

BUSK Benchmark
Simply Safe gives a teacher the reassurance, backed up by a process of quality and safety checking, that a coach operator is doing everything it can to deliver a safe, professional and quality service. Reading all this, you might think that Simply Safe is generating more work for an operator. Yes there’s some additional administration involved, but at its heart, Simply Safe is all about measuring what every coach operator is legally required to do.
   
So what about those operators who choose to do more than the basics? BUSK Benchmark is the UK’s first and only star rating for the coach industry based on safety compliance. This six-star rating is awarded to companies that have introduced more than they are legally required to do.

Room sharing
Its all very well for BUSK to describe what it is doing to offer reassurance to anyone wanting to hire a coach for a school trip, but here are a few more points that should be considered.
   
Avoid hiring from a coach company or a tour operator that expects or forces the coach driver or drivers to share rooms at hotels. This situation often arises in continental Europe when costs need to be kept down, but it can equally arise in the UK. It may be perfectly fine for a teacher to share a room with a colleague, but coach drivers are strictly governed by the regulations concerning their driving hours.
   
Those regulations mean the driver is required to rest, relax and get proper, undisturbed sleep between driving the party around. If a driver shares a room, this can be compromised, especially, and this is a serious point, if another driver sharing the same room is prone to loud snoring. The same applies to ferry crossings where berths are booked for drivers. All too often BUSK hears of four drivers who perhaps don’t even know one another who are expected to share these tiny spaces.

Safety critical
While we’re looking at the importance of the driver to ensuring a successful school trip, there’s another issue that affects continental trips. Why do schools often choose to make return journey through the night? If it’s because the tour company says that’s how it has to be, that’s nonsense. There are a host of safety concerns with such a decision. 
   
The temptation, by teachers and children, to undo a safety belt to curl up on a coach seat is high. Teachers simply cannot fulfil their duty of care and provide a safe journey if they’re asleep. The other huge associated risk with driving through the night is the common practice of schools checking the party out of the hotel on the last day right after breakfast. They usually check the driver out too. In some cases the driver is expected to drive the party to the slopes when in fact, he should be resting and sleeping through the day ready for the long journey back. Hanging around all day without any facility to rest properly, and then be expected to be refreshed to drive back in the early evening is just impossible.
   
Parents need to be given the choice of paying a little more to cover an additional night’s stop-over.  There really is no argument that the driver who drives the coach on its homeward journey must have had a good night’s sleep and be fully refreshed. Parents who pay anything up to around £900 for a skiing trip for their child are hardly likely to refuse to pay a small additional sum to ensure their child spends another night in the hotel and also, ensure that the driver gets that all important sleep before setting off on the long journey home.
   
We have focused on the key points that need to be addressed by anyone responsible for hiring a coach for a school trip. In general, the vast majority of coach operators provide an excellent service, and standards are continually increasing across the industry but, at the heart of all of this is the vital importance of doing research.

Further information
www.busk-uk.co.uk