Autumn has its rituals, the most prominent of which is the beginning of a new school year. Whether you’re the parent of school-age children or not you know that this is a period of the year where your morning schedule needs some preparation, both organisational and mental.
Not so the Labour Government. While on a high during the last electoral campaign it promised free and supervised school transport for everyone. Having done little on either education or transport in the previous four years, here was a way for the Government to re-ingratiate itself with voters. Parents would be spared the school run and motorists in general would be spared some traffic on the roads.
Getting down to work
That was June of last year. The election that month confirmed Labour in office. No need for it time to find its feet or set up a new administration. It had government experience, knowing full well the strengths and weaknesses of the system and being able to rely on full time staff to implement its programme. It had more than a year to draw up its plans, bounce them off with stakeholders and enact them in practice.
It would have required time, of course. But that was something the Government had. What it didn’t was a sense of proportion, some basic foresight and a modicum of responsibility. And lacking those qualities, it could do nothing with the time it had than to carelessly waste it. A lack of sense of proportion and foresight led it to underestimate the number of students that would be involved and overestimate the availability of means of transport.
Blame it on the parents
Worst of all was the lack of a sense of responsibility. The Prime Minister recently went on air for some pre-emptive damage-control action. First thing he said was not to expect the system to be perfect from the beginning. Warming up with setting the bar fairly low, he then proceeded to come up with the lamest excuse since “the dog ate my homework”: choosing to blame parents “for having left until the very last minute”. Of course nobody believes that. The lackadaisical attitude since late last year when Parliament voted the scheme’s budget is entirely his own making and interested parents could not move faster if the Government decided to go slow.
The truth is that parents, school administrators and transport operators were kept in the dark. Nobody is better placed than they are to know children’s transport needs, what resources can and have to be made available and how to actually run the system. Yet, the Government felt that there was no need to consult them or be transparent with its intentions. Inevitably, excluding the people who are concerned the most with the scheme, led to the chaos that we are in now.
Spill over
What’s worse is that there is the shoddy planning and preparation are having a contagion effect. Parents who are ready to pay for school transport, as long as they have the peace of mind that their children are at school safely and on time, found themselves sucked in as most means of transport available were deployed to service a poorly-planned scheme. The same shortage is now affecting the incoming tourism sector with operators facing the possibility that it will be hard to find the means to bus tourists around at certain times of the day.
It’s been five years. Enough for a Party in power to learn some valuable lessons. Labour has certainly honed its electoral skills to perfection. In education particularly in this school transport scheme it has not gone beyond the amateurish. With the new scholastic year comes the first lesson: Labour lacks foresight and planning abilities.
Clyde Puli PN Secretary General & Shadow Minister of Education