Case study: Oxfordshire & Rutland home-to-school schemes

Local authorities have a statutory duty to provide free home-to-school transport for children who attend their nearest suitable school and cannot reasonably be expected to walk there because of the distance; or because of a special educational need, a disability or mobility problem; or because the route is unsafe.

Home-to-school transport is one of the fastest growing areas of spending for local authorities in England, according to the National Audit Office, which says spending by councils in England on home-to-school transport rose by 70% between 2015-16 and 2023-24. An estimated 520,000 children and young people in England get home-to-school transport, costing local authorities £2.3 billion in 2023-24.

In the following case study, we examine two projects in which Unicard delivered improved home-to-school transport schemes for local authorities:

Oxfordshire County Council: migrating their home-to-school bus pass scheme to a more powerful customer management system (CMS) with new web portals
Rutland County Council: replacing their plastic home-to-school bus passes with smartcard passes with extra functionality

Oxfordshire – overview

Oxfordshire County Council received an initial £12.7m after successfully bidding for funding from the government’s National Bus Strategy to help transport authorities and bus operators work together to develop a Bus Service Improvement Plan. The council wanted this funding to support measures including cheaper fares for under-19s, new rural services, and bus priority improvements across the county, and formed an enhanced partnership with local bus operators to improve services.

As part of these improvements, Oxfordshire chose Unicard to modernise the IT infrastructure supporting their concessionary cardholder management solution. This was being used to support the council’s home-to-school scheme, offering free travel assistance for school-aged children.

Oxfordshire – project requirements

Oxfordshire County Council had an existing CMS that it used to manage cards and cardholders for its home-to-school and ENCTS schemes. This CMS was operating at full capacity, hindering ambitions to introduce richer functionality to the application. This CMS was working in conjunction with an on-premise Unicard HOPS and an online portal for concessionary customers.

Unicard was asked to provide a replacement system for the data storage, reporting and production of smartcard bus passes and correspondence relevant to ENCTS and companion (non-smartcard) passes for Oxfordshire. This work included the deployment and configuration of a new home-to-school portal, and enabling invoice functionality within Smart Office.

Delivering this would involve:

Migrating the current CMS data to the new Unicard Smart Office CMS
Developing new web portals: a home-to-school portal and an ENCTS portal (both integrated with Smart Office)
Invoice functionality, including invoice creation, invoice imports, and payment processing aligned to business rules
Migrating the on-premise HOPS to a cloud-based HOPS

The new Smart Office, HOPS and reporting functionality would all be hosted on AWS.

Oxfordshire – project solution

Unicard delivered the Oxfordshire solution in stages:

Migrating the current Oxfordshire CMS account data for the concessionary passes to the new Smart Office solution in AWS, as well as migrating all other existing accounts from the old CMS.
Providing a system for data storage, reporting and production of all smartcard passes and correspondence relevant to home-to-school and ENCTS customers
Creating Smart Office connections to the printing bureau
Setting up and configuring new portals for the home-to-school and ENCTS schemes
Migrating the Unicard HOPS from on-premise to AWS

The migration solution for Oxfordshire’s home-to-school scheme had to correctly handle student account creation and updates, invoice generation, card requests, applications made via the old portal, historical data migration, and complex card-to-person-group allocation rules.

The process detected and reported any data issues, allowed the configuration of invoice generation, and ensured all imported invoices were payable via the new home-to-school portal. Historical invoices, QR codes, routes, notes, documents, photos, and audit histories were migrated and attached to the correct accounts in the new Smart Office solution.

Oxfordshire – key outcomes

Unicard’s migration process from the old system to the new one successfully ensured data accuracy, payment readiness via the home-to-school portal, regulatory traceability and operational continuity for the council. The new solution went live in August 2026.

This brought the following benefits:

The ability for the council to introduce new features and functionality
Improved system performance thanks to increases in capacity and the use of APIs
Greater configurability and flexibility
An improved user interface for all administrative functions
Improved privacy features including additional data encryption

The move to an AWS cloud environment offers benefits which include:

Improved performance and scalability to handle increased traffic and user demands effectively, resulting in enhanced performance, reduced latency and improved user experience
Enhanced security and compliance, including data encryption, firewalls and identity access management, to ensure the highest level of protection for sensitive data
Increased agility and innovation from AWS services, which offer tools and technologies to enhance application functionality and enable rapid innovation

Rutland – overview

Rutland County Council asked Unicard to help them replace their youth cards for home-to-school bus travel with smartcard versions so they could enable journey tracking and reporting, and reduce the misuse of passes.

Rutland – project requirements

Students were using plastic non-smartcard passes, which they showed to the bus driver while boarding, but this provided limited visibility of card usage. The council wanted to replace these with ITSO smartcards to be tapped when boarding, enabling better tracking and control. Each personalised card would be linked to a specific bus route, ensuring students could only travel on their assigned service.

The council wanted the replacement School Travel Pass ready for the start of the new academic year in September 2026.

The project had the following additional requirements:

To control usage of the new passes, the scheme needed to introduce hotlisting
Existing Ticketer ETMs within buses should be used to validate the new passes
Unicard would support the council in defining the ITSO encoding to be used for the new passes
Just one new product type should be used to cover all school cardholders needs
All changes should be accommodated within the version of Smart Office that was already in use by Rutland

Rutland – project solution

As agreed, Rutland’s existing Ticketer ETMs were used to read the new School Travel Pass, and their existing Unicard Smart Office CMS was used to create, manage and issue the cards.

Introducing the new card required the creation and registration of a new ITSO product (Type 16) within Rutland’s ITSO environment. The council had no existing Type 16 products registered at that time, meaning they needed to complete the formal ITSO registration process before Unicard could proceed with the required encoding and configuration activities. We agreed to support Rutland in this by providing guidance and a proposed product definition.

Delivering the new passes for Rutland required changes to their existing Smart Office CMS and HOPS applications:

Smart Office – to enable the management of the new smartcards and the related customer data
HOPS – to enable the encoding and processing of the new smartcards

Making these changes allowed Unicard to deliver the following elements of the solution:

Student records managed in Smart Office
Travel products assigned and issued via Smart Office
Cards encoded to ITSO standards using HOPS
Cards printed and dispatched via a bureau
Validation of the cards via the existing Ticketer ETMs

Rutland – key outcomes

Unicard successfully deployed Rutland’s new School Travel Pass solution in August 2026, ahead of the start of the schools’ academic year in September 2026.

This deployment included:

A new configured Smart Office environment to support the new passes
Configured HOPS encoding for the new passes
An updated bureau Interface Control Document (ICD) and carrier letter to allow the printing and delivery of the new passes
A fully tested end-to-end solution

Rutland was already using Smart Office before this project began, which made introducing the new School Travel Pass to Rutland much simpler thanks to Smart Office’s inbuilt configuration options.

This allowed us to quickly and easily make the necessary ITSO configuration changes to the cards and their associated products.

Customer backgrounds

Oxfordshire County Council is the upper-tier local authority for the non-metropolitan county of Oxfordshire in the south-east of England. Its vision is to make Oxfordshire a greener, fairer and healthier county – shaping strong and connected communities, healthy places to live and a thriving local economy that benefits everyone.

Rutland County Council is the local authority for the non-metropolitan county of Rutland in the East Midlands of England. It seeks to provide a transport system and services that facilitate delivery of sustainable population and economic growth, meet the needs of the most vulnerable residents and support a high level of health and wellbeing.