Falkirk Council: Pupils left waiting for 90 minutes on school bus service to Denny High

Youngsters in Bonnybridge were left stranded on the first two days of the new school term last week when their expected bus never turned up.

One angry dad said: “The 611 service was said to have been delayed on the first day of term but when it didn’t turn up the council had to get another operator to do the run.

"Then we were told there would be a problem getting the kids home again, only for the bus to be almost 30 minutes late to collect them.

"The following day the bus missed four of the stops on the route. The driver was meant to come back which they eventually did. But it meant children stood outside from 8.05am until being picked up at 9.35am.

"The driver was rude when we asked what was going on and when I contacted the bus company to complain the phone was put down on me.

"It’s been a shocking standard of service. It seems the council are trying to save money but at the expense of children trying to get to school. For some of them it was their first days at high school.”

He said that this week there had been a vast improvement with the buses turning up on time.

A Falkirk Council spokesperson said: “Last week, one of our school bus operators had a shortage of drivers due to Covid related issues which had an impact on some of our school services.

“We are sorry for the disruption this caused in getting pupils to school on their first week back after the summer holidays and will work with our contracted operators to ensure that any inconvenience is kept to an absolute minimum in future.

“Unfortunately, transport operators across the country are experiencing a driver shortage which occasionally affects our contracted bus and taxi provision.”

Falkirk Council announced earlier this month that it was reducing the bus services across Falkirk district. It blamed a 21 per cent increase in costs with operators saying the pandemic, fuel prices and the impact of Brexit and Ukraine saw them tendering higher bids to run the subsidised services.