A tale of one town: why transport policy is an educational access issue.
This is the first part of HEPI’s themed week of blogs all about commuter students. The second blog is available here.
This blog was authored by Rose Stephenson, Director of Policy and Strategy at HEPI.
Access to education for rural students
I work in London on a regular basis, conveniently hopping on tubes and buses with only a few minutes’ wait each time. I use this brilliant transport infrastructure to get to events, speaking engagements and roundtables to discuss higher education policy. If the event topic touches on access issues, I will raise the lack of public transport to education in rural areas. This often results in a sea of blank faces from policymakers who have just experienced the magic of Transport for London and cannot comprehend a patchy, unreliable, unintegrated transport system – but this is the reality for many students living rurally.
When I’m not in London, I reside in a small market town on the edge of the Cotswolds. It is heaven. However, if you do not have a car or cannot drive, access to public services, including further and higher education, is extremely challenging. Allow me to share some examples. There are six universities within an hour’s drive. However, the shortest daily commute using public transport (there and back) is 2 hours and 46 minutes to the Royal College of Agriculture. The next-shortest daily commute would be 4 hours to UWE. I can drive to the University of Bath in 50 minutes, yet a daily commute on public transport would take 6 hours and requires three buses and two trains in each direction.
The 2026 HEPI and Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey demonstrates that rural students are much more likely to complete their studies online, with a quarter of students living in a village being likely to do so. While this may be a positive choice for some of these students (many of whom were juggling multiple responsibilities), this raises serious questions about the realities and limitations of student choice and access for those living in rural locales.
This is an issue for Further Education Students also. Local authorities have a duty to provide free transport for eligible children of compulsory school age. This local authority duty ends when a child is older than ‘compulsory school age’, generally at the end of Year 11.
So, while the Government states that young adults ‘must’ stay in education or training to 18 (there are no legal consequences if they do not), the local authority no longer has a duty to provide transport to get them there. FE students from my town can access SGS College in Stroud in a speedy 51 minutes (each way), however, because buses only run a few times a day, they have to arrive in Stroud before 8am and hang around after college waiting for a return journey home. In researching this blog, local parents shared concerns about their children having to wait at a bus stop for an hour or an hour and a half, either for the first bus after college or because of frequent missed connections.
Parents also told me:
I have no idea where my year 11 will be able to get to next year, we are seriously considering that our only option may be to get him on the moped.
Young people are seriously disadvantaged when faced with a lack of public transport that is fit for purpose to reliably access further education, apprenticeship training and employment. Not everyone can drive or afford to learn to drive and run a car, not everyone has parents who can afford the buses to college, and not everyone has parents who can work flexibly to take their children to and from college and apprenticeship placements.
I also spoke to a careers professional working rurally, who told me:
There is a careers evening in the autumn of Year 11. This helps to raise aspirations by talking about exciting courses in Bristol – but they can’t get there. I explore options with them, but they don’t have parents who can rearrange work schedules. Not everyone can have these conversations at home.
There was a firm view from both parents and professionals that the students most affected by the lack of public transport were those from widening participation backgrounds.
Recommendations
There are two policy issues here:
- The ending of local authority responsibility (and therefore funding) to support young people in accessing education when they reach 16. There are currently a million NEETS in the UK. Ensuring that those who want to access further education can do so would be a positive step to preventing this number from growing.
- The policy blind spot of transport connectivity and higher education (and kudos to colleagues at Wonkhe who have been highlighting this issue for a while).
The Department for Transport publishes a Transport Connectivity Metric. The overview of this metric states:
The Department for Transport has developed the connectivity metric, which measures an individual’s ability to reach employment, services and social engagements.
However, in relation to education, the document goes on to outline:
Education covers primary and secondary schools, further education (ages 16-18), special needs schools and private education. Universities are excluded due to the complexity in pinpointing single access points, as they typically consist of numerous buildings, including administrative and non-educational facilities.
The Department for Transport must develop a more focused approach to transport and higher education, particularly for students living in rural areas. With an increased number of students choosing, or having to, live at home, there is a real risk that some students will be unable to access higher education or will only be able to access their course through an online provider, restricting their choice of course, institution and mode of study.
Photo credit: Pauline McGuinness
Comments
Jonathan Alltimes says:
We do not know the number of higher education students who live ruraI areas in England. It is over 70 years since rural areas began another era of decline as centres of work caused by the mechanisation in agriculture. Local authorities will have done the sums. Who will subsidise the cost of transport? Let’s say the not for profit cost of hiring a small bus carrying 25 passengers with part-time drivers is £250 per day, that is £10 per person both ways or say £75,000 per year or £3,000 per person. Multiply that figure by the provision of many routes. That is the reason why public bus services are subsidised, even in centres of high population. Unit costs per passenger are lower with more passengers, but the data is not reported. It is less costly and likely to be more convenient if you provide your own means of transport than someone else, including yourselves, subsidising a bus service.
Does a student need to participate in person everyday? Broadband can be an excellent substitute for in person attendance. If you can not move house then the moped or electric bike could be an option.
Reply
Rose Stephenson says:
Thanks for engaging Jonathan. However, the presumptions in your comment underline some of the issues. Rural bus routes do need public money to function, and there is very little public money available – hence the huge loss of rural bus routes over the last five years. However, just thinking about students, the reasons that these routes should be funded are as follows:
1) Students shouldn’t have to move house in order to study (and many can’t afford to).
2) If students study online (and there are many excellent online options), they cannot access maintenance grants, and their course options are limited. For a young person living in my town, they could not study a health professional course (medicine, nursing etc) as they would struggle to reach both in-person classes and placements.
3) I am a keen and confident cyclist and a former moped rider (when I lived in a city). I wouldn’t ride either of these on the routes to Bath, Bristol, or Gloucester – I certainly wouldn’t allow my 16-year-old child to do so.
4) What is the economic impact of not funding public transport links to education, employment and training? We are pushing ambitious young people into NEET status because they literally cannot access the available opportunities. This is particularly true for those who are already disadvantaged. Becoming NEET as a young person risks long-term unemployment, and with the number of NEETs we already have in the UK, a long-term impact on the economy.
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