Faith School Transport Cuts

There was a news item on the BBC this morning about cuts being made by local authorities. The plan is to axe free transport for children attending faith schools. East Sussex being one of them.

There then followed an interesting discussion with Minette Marrin who simply couldn’t stay on topic. The discussion was not about the merits or otherwise of faith schools, it was about whether the local authority should fund transport. The other person was a head teacher of a faith school. This woman’s argument was very strange. Unable to justify why one section of the population should have access to taxpayer funding that is denied to others, her core argument amounted to “we’ve always done it this way”. She also tried to claim that cutting the funding amounted to discrimination. That, frankly, was barrel scraping on an industrial scale. Parents choose to send their children to these schools. If they incur a cost, well, that goes with the territory. To claim that not being given taxpayers’ money is discrimination is beyond absurd.

One of the parents interviewed in the street used the “we are taxpayers, too” argument. Well, yes, they are. So are the people funding their choice. I tend to agree with the councillor interviewed who made that point; that people who choose to send their children to a particular school, for whatever reason, need to accept that choices bring with them consequences. In this case, the extra travel costs incurred. Why should they not bear the burden of this cost?

Given the parlours state of the public purse, that seems a perfectly reasonable stance and “we’ve always done it this way” as a reason to keep paying doesn’t float, I’m afraid.

Of course if we all paid less tax due to the state spending less money, then there would be more money available for people to make their choices, but I realise that that is far too radical…