Brent Council has apologised for the problems special needs pupils and their parents encountered with the new school transport system introduced this term LINK. They admitted:
We know that many families have not had the information they needed, when they needed it, about the services for their child. We also know that in some cases transport has failed to arrive when it should have, some children have been delivered to wrong locations, and there have been problems with route timings. To compound these problems it has been extremely difficult to get through to the (West London Alliance) Transport Bureau on the phone. We understand how upsetting, inconvenient and difficult this is to all those affected and can only apologise.They went on:
It is clear that the Bureau was over optimistic about the timetables for implementing the new IT system on which they were relying and that serious problems about data transfer from former IT systems, incomplete testing of the system, and the relative inexperience of staff led to the problems that have occurred.As a result of this failure Brent and Harrow Councils' transport staff temporarily took back the responsibility for designing routes last week and 'will develop new and reliable routes and schedules for their Boroughs based on last term's routes, using their previous software packages'.
