CASE STUDY
How Powys County Council saved £500k in year one with MoveSmarter
Location: Powys, Wales | Service Area: Rural and remote learner transport, including SEND
At a glance: £500k saved in the first full year, sustained year after year. 8,000+ learners transported daily. A single platform replacing spreadsheets, emails and disconnected systems.
The challenge
Powys County Council delivers school transport to over 8,000 learners every day, spanning mainstream and SEND, across one of the most geographically demanding areas in the UK. For years, the team managed this through spreadsheets, emails and siloed systems: manually compiled loading lists that didn't reliably match who was actually travelling, DBS checks and crew or contract details tracked apart from the routes they belonged to, eligibility decisions and supporting evidence spread across different tools, and no way to see, let alone cost, how the network was performing as a whole.
As Sue Avery, Lead Officer for School Transport, puts it:
"It's not all about routing, to be honest; it's about being able to manage the transport needs for learners in a way that doesn't rely on spreadsheets which don't have the reliability or functionality needed."
Sue Avery: Lead Officer, School Transport, Powys County Council
The solution
Powys partnered with Kodergarten to bring its entire transport operation onto MoveSmarter. Where many planning tools focus purely on routing, MoveSmarter manages the whole process end to end: application forms, PTU workflows, efficient route planning, eligibility checking, loading lists, live journey reporting via NFC and QR card taps (allowing capacity vs loading vs actual usage data to be captured), a direct API link with the parent portal that feeds live route information back to families and pulls applications straight in, and a self-service portal where operators manage their own crew, DBS checks and view the route of services they run, as well as download loading lists for the services they're contracted to fulfil. Co-designed with the Powys transport team around their real workflows, it replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets and standalone systems with a single connected process.
Shaun James, Senior Manager for Highways Technical, Environmental and Travel, sums up the shift:
"MoveSmarter has fundamentally changed how we manage learner transport and transformed how our team works. It has strengthened our operational efficiency and effectiveness, through smarter use of time, improved routes and capacity. The platform provides valuable insight and confidence in our decision-making, enabling a better service for learners and families through smarter use of our data."
Shaun James: Senior Manager – Highways Technical, Environmental and Travel, Powys County Council
The results
Sarah Leyland-Morgan, Professional Lead for Sustainable Travel and Passenger Transport, explains:
"The system delivered an initial £500k saving in its first full year. Through more strategic route planning, we've been able to sustain those cost-efficiencies year-over-year."
Sarah Leyland-Morgan: Professional Lead for Sustainable Travel and Passenger Transport, Powys County Council
That scale of saving puts the cost of the system itself into perspective: MoveSmarter costs Powys a fraction of what it saves them annually.
Beyond the savings, Powys has seen faster application processing, real safeguarding visibility through card taps that confirm exactly when and where each learner boards and disembarks, and a transport team, schools and operators now working from one shared source of truth instead of duplicating effort across systems.
What's next
Powys and Kodergarten continue to build on this foundation, with CO₂ emissions reporting, automated service planning, email based parent communications, and one-click application assessment (checking eligibility and recommending the best route), all in the active pipeline. In Powys alone, that could transform decisions on the roughly 80% of applications that are straightforward.
The MoveSmarter app's safeguarding capability, capturing boarding, disembarking and real-time journey information via card taps, will be available to other local authorities later this year (Q3/Q4). In addition, for local authorities in Wales, TfW are in discussions with Powys and Kodergarten to trial a TfW one card integration from September 2026; this would bring the same safeguarding and live vehicle reporting to 16+ and home-to-school learners travelling on TfW-printed cards across public services too, giving Wales a MoveSmarter able to report on safeguarding, boarding and live vehicles across both public and dedicated home-to-school routes.
MoveSmarter is available via G-Cloud 14.