Support for students who live in rural areas
The county council provides financial support to a limited number of local bus services and encourages operators to publish timetables that are suitable for school/college start and finish times. Where public transport is available, purchasing travel passes on public transport or buying into transport arranged by a school or college themselves, may be your cheapest option.
Good practice from the Department for Education suggests that students may reasonably be expected to travel up to 75 minutes each way. Travel time includes time spent walking to/from stops, waiting times, driving, travelling on college or school-arranged transport, and using public transport or trains (or a combination of these). The 75 minutes does not include the waiting time between arrival at school/college and the general school/college start and end time.
Students with a journey time of over 75 minutes may be eligible for assistance. This is in addition to the options and support detailed elsewhere in this statement and is available to all students (low income or not) but will be of less benefit to those in urban areas.
If you wish to apply under these grounds, please provide supporting information you wish to be considered to make your case, for example, the rural nature of your home address and how this affects your journey and why you or your parents/carers are not able to make your own travel arrangements.
If we agree to assist, this would generally be in the form of a payment of a mileage allowance per day attended for the journey from home to the nearest appropriate bus/train stop, plus provision of a public bus pass or passes. A contribution towards the cost would be required at the same rate as detailed in our post 16 transport statement (for 2024-25 this would be annual fee of £800 for non-low income students, reduced to £632 for low income students).
For information, the government has published the 2011 Rural-Urban Classification for Output Areas in England (publishing.service.gov.uk), which defines areas into one of four urban or six rural categories.
