Letter: Children at risk on school buses

Sir: Two years ago, our 10-year-old daughter, Charlotte, was killed outside our house when eight- year-old boys shut her coat in the door of the school bus and the driver pulled away without looking. Parents of the many other children killed by school transport will no doubt feel as we do about the news of the two boys injured by their school bus in Ayrshire yesterday and by the report last week that 10 school buses in Somerset had been taken off the road as unsafe.

This subject refuses to go away, as campaigners and victims' parents are too well aware. But because children do not vote or pay taxes, it gets minimal attention; all the more so when it happens in a year during which overall road accident figures are falling - something to which officials can grasp gratefully.

On her last day at school, asked to write about 'trust', our daughter wrote: 'I trust the driver to take me safely home.' Let us all think long and hard about who we trust to take our children to school and back and bear that in mind as this debate receives its pitifully short 15 minutes of publicity.

Yours,

PETER WHITBY

Porlock, Somerset

4 May