Supporting Compliance in School Transport – What’s in the Pipeline?

Local authorities are under growing pressure to ensure home-to-school transport services are safe, compliant, and cost-effective. While safeguarding and efficiency are always front of mind, meeting contractual and environmental obligations is equally critical.

At MoveSmarter, we’re building tools to help local authorities manage operator compliance more easily. One upcoming feature on our roadmap focuses on vehicle checks and driver confirmations. We’ll be updating our handheld scanning devices to include:

• A prompt for the driver to confirm the vehicle registration at the start of the journey
• A confirmation that a vehicle walkaround has been performed successfully

These small additions serve a vital purpose — supporting local authority contract oversight by ensuring operators are fulfilling their obligations before every journey.

There’s an environmental benefit too. By capturing the vehicle registration number, we can better match journey data to vehicle type and emissions category. This enables more accurate CO₂ emissions reporting — another feature currently in development.

Our goal is to support local authorities in working towards the Welsh Government’s ambition, as outlined in “Net Zero Carbon Status by 2030: A route map for decarbonisation across the Welsh public sector.”

Every step towards better data, oversight and accountability brings us closer to transport systems that are not only safer and more efficient, but part of a sustainable public sector future.

Let’s MoveSmarter.