This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Lessons to Learn, The Herald’s weekly newsletter all about Scottish education.

This week you’ve got both myself and my colleague Garrett Stell, and we’re revisiting a story that we worked on last year – and which certainly hasn’t gone away.

In June last year, we heard about proposals to change the rules around buses for secondary school pupils in North Lanarkshire. In the past, anyone living more than two miles away got a free place on a school bus, but now the council wanted to increase that to three miles.

There were major concerns not just about the distance, and the Scottish climate, but also the safety of young people who were being asked to walk up to six miles a day along routes that parents told us absolutely were not safe, despite the council having apparently commissioned surveys saying otherwise.

I live near one of the schools affected, so I decided to go and have a look for myself. I walked the full three-mile route from the edge of the boundary at Millerston all the way along to Chryston High School. Even on a warm, dry day during the summer, there were plenty of very obvious problems, including one particular part where I – a nearly forty-year-old man – didn’t feel safe.

You can read all about it, and watch a video, here.

Some of the........

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