Transport¶
Who does this: Transport Manager Where: Transport How often: At the start of the year, then as families join and leave
Transport has three parts: the routes the buses run, the people who ride them, and the seat each child is given for the year.
Bus ── Route ── Stops along it
│ │
│ └── the children allocated to it, this year
│
├── Driver
├── Bus attendant
└── The bus's own papers — registration, insurance, inspection, operating card, permit
Buses¶
A school bus is a vehicle in the school's fleet, with the school's own details added: the bus number painted on the side (which is not the plate, and is what prints on a child's ID card), the number of student seats, the driver and attendant who ride it, and its papers.
Marking a vehicle as a School Bus is what brings it into this app.
Transport → Bus & Driver Register is the register a transport manager works from: every bus with its number, its driver, the driver's licence number and expiry, and the expiry of each of the bus's own documents, all sortable and filterable by the date that matters.
The register's dates are read from the documents
The expiry columns are read-only on the register. Changing a date means editing the document behind it, and the register follows. One place to change, one place that can be wrong.
A bus's next document expiry includes its driver's documents as well as its own — a bus with current papers and a driver whose licence lapsed on Thursday is not a bus that runs on Sunday.
Routes¶
Transport → Routes → Routes.
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Route Name and Route No. | |
| Bus | Which bus runs it |
| Driver and Bus Attendant | Defaults from the bus; can be overridden per route |
| Distance | |
| Morning Departure and Afternoon Departure | |
| Route Capacity | A cap below the bus's own seats, where the school wants one |
| Transport Fee | The annual fee for riding this route |
| Seats · Seats Taken · Seats Free | Kept up to date automatically |
A route outlives the year. Which child sits on it does not — that is the allocation.
Stops¶
Transport → Routes → Stops, or the Stops tab on the route.
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Stop Name, Landmark, street and city | The landmark is what a parent actually recognises |
| Sequence | The order along the route |
| Pickup Time and Drop-off Time | |
| Stop Capacity | A safety limit on how many children are collected at one point |
| Students | How many are collected there, kept up to date |
A stop's capacity cannot be lowered below the number of children already collected there.
Drivers and bus attendants¶
Transport → People → Drivers and Bus Attendants.
A driver may be a member of school staff, or a contractor's driver with no employee record at all. Both are recorded here, because the second is the group most likely to turn up with a lapsed licence, and a school still has to hold their papers.
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Driver Name | |
| Employee | Where the driver is on the school payroll |
| Contractor | Where they are not |
| Phone and Mobile | |
| Driving for the School Since | |
| Licence Class | |
| Documents tab | Their ID and driving licence, with numbers and expiry dates |
Allocating a seat¶
Transport → Transport Allocations.
An allocation is one child, for one year, on one route.
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Enrollment | Which child, in which year |
| Route | Which fills in the bus, bus number and driver |
| Pickup Point and Drop-off Point | Stops on that route |
| Trip No. | |
| Trip Type | Two Way · One Way – Morning Only · One Way – Afternoon Only |
| Transport Fee | Defaults from the route |
| From and Until | The first and last day the child rides |
One-way is recorded with its direction
Not as a single "one way" value. The bus attendant has to know whether to expect a child on the afternoon bus, and "one-way" on its own does not answer that.
The process¶
- Transport → Transport Allocations → New, choose the child's enrollment and the route.
- Choose the pickup and drop-off points from that route's stops.
- Set the trip type and check the fee.
- Press Activate.
What Activate checks¶
Four things, in order:
| Check | What it means |
|---|---|
| The academic year is open | No seat is allocated in a closed year |
| The enrollment is live | A withdrawn child does not get a seat |
| The bus, route and stop have room | The message says which limit was hit and by how much |
| — | And the child's transport type is set to School Bus |
The three capacity limits are checked in this order:
| Limit | Zero means |
|---|---|
| Student seats on the bus | No limit |
| Route capacity | Follow the bus |
| Stop capacity | No limit |
A route may cap below its bus — a fifty-seat bus on a route the school holds to forty because the last leg is a narrow street.
Capacity is checked when you activate, not when you plan
A draft allocation is a plan. A school laying out next year's routes should be able to write down more children than currently fit while it decides which bus to add.
Ending and changing an allocation¶
| Button | Use it when |
|---|---|
| End Allocation | The child stops using the bus, or changes route mid-year |
| Cancel | The allocation was a mistake, or never started |
| Reset to Draft | A correction before it started. Refused while the allocation is still active — end or cancel it first. |
A child who changed route in March keeps both rows: the one that ended and the one that took over. Only one may be active at a time, and the system enforces it.
Ending a child's last allocation sets their transport type back to None. The child's record and their bus seat never drift apart.
How the transport fee reaches the bill¶
It is not posted from here. The child's transport type — set by activating an allocation — is what the fee process reads to decide whether the optional transport component of the published fee structure applies to them.
That means a school can run buses without using the fee side of the system at all, and the two never contradict each other when it does use both. See Fees and collection.
The bus and driver document file¶
Every paper the regulator asks for is a document row on the bus or on the driver, in the same checklist the whole school uses:
| On the bus | On the driver |
|---|---|
| Registration (Istimara) | Driver ID |
| Insurance | Driving licence |
| Periodic inspection (Fahas) | |
| Operating card | |
| Transport permit |
Each carries its number and its expiry date, and both appear as columns on the bus and driver register. Adding a further kind of document is a new checklist row — no code, no release. See Document checklists.
Who can do what¶
| Routes, stops, buses, drivers, allocations | |
|---|---|
| Transport Manager | Full, and can open the bus record itself |
| Administrator | Full, including deletion |
Deleting an allocation is the Administrator's alone: an allocation is what a transport fee was raised against.
What is coming later¶
- Transport attendance — who boarded, morning and afternoon, per trip, and the alert for a child nobody accounted for.
- The transport attendance report and the bus and driver register report.
- Per-bus cost attribution, once expenses are in the system.