Mobility

1. Learner transport safety matters because it protects children’s lives and ensures they can travel to and from school without the risk of accidents or injury.

When transport is safe and reliable, learners are more likely to attend school regularly, which supports better academic performance since they arrive focused and ready to learn.  It also builds trust among parents and communities, knowing that children are in secure conditions during their journey.

Safe transport helps prevent risky behavior such as overcrowding or reckless driving, while also promoting important road safety habits that learners can carry into adulthood. In addition, it reduces legal and financial consequences for transport providers and ensures equal access to education, especially for learners who live far from school or in rural areas.

Most schools and learner transport routes fall within municipal road networks. The Department has therefore integrated its learner transport safety programme with municipalities and Road Safety Management, ensuring coordinated and targeted interventions.

Key measures implemented include the following:

• Heightened joint operations planned and executed with municipalities, with a specific focus on learner transport routes and times of peak learner movement.
• A significant increase in learner transport enforcement operations, reflected in the Department’s 2026/27 Annual Performance Plan.
• Registration data for scholar transport vehicles has been loaded onto departmental systems, enabling traffic officers to identify registered versus unregistered learner transport vehicles during operations.
• Targeted route-based interventions on roads leading to schools, focusing not only on registered scholar transport, but also on public transport and private vehicles transporting learners.
• During the reporting period, the Department conducted:
• 468 learner transport-focused operations
  • 1 241 public transport operations, which also included vehicles transporting learners
  • 350 scholar patrol interventions to improve safety at school crossings
  • 98 road safety education talks conducted at schools
  • The establishment of 14 Junior Traffic Training Centres (JTTCs) to promote road safety awareness among learners

These combined enforcement, education and coordination measures are aimed at improving safety outcomes for learners both on routes to school and during transportation.

2. Incidents involving learner transport recorded in the past 12 months

Learner transport remains a high-risk environment, and our response has been firm, visible, and unrelenting.

Over the past 12 months, targeted learner transport operations have resulted in well over 5 000 fines issued and more than 150 vehicles impounded for serious violations. These include overloading, unroadworthy vehicles, and non-compliance with operating license conditions.

Each one of these interventions represents a potential incident prevented.

In addition to Provincial Traffic, municipal traffic services across the province continue to prioritise learner transport operations, ensuring a coordinated and sustained enforcement presence on the ground.

As recently as last week, a joint operation at Cascade Primary School in Mitchells Plain led to over 250 fines issued and 17 vehicles impounded in a single morning. In one instance, a 7-seater was found transporting 23 learners, and a 15-seater transporting 27 learners.

That is not just non-compliance, it is a direct threat to the lives of our children.

This is not a system that waits for incidents to be recorded after the fact. It is a system that actively identifies risk and removes it from our roads.