Changes to Didcot Schools Services for 2025/26

Following a change in funding from Ridgeway Education Trust, we’ve had to review the way we offer bus travel to and from Didcot Girls School and St Birinus School from September 2025.

We’re committed to offering travel options for students for the 2025/26 academic year and beyond, but we’ll now require students to purchase a dedicated service-specific ticket to use our BB services.

To ensure we’re providing services to the correct areas, we’ll initially be offering 3 options based on our current BB routes. Customers will need to select the appropriate service and specify where they plan to board the bus in the morning. Whilst we plan to run services to the same locations we have this year, we’ll need to make sure that there’s sufficient numbers of students wanting to travel in order to make sure our services are viable to operate.

We’ll need at least 65 customers per service to operate a route, and capacity will be limited to 75 places on a first come, first served basis. If we see high levels of demands from certain areas, we’ll look to offer a second bus to the same stops on the same basis (i.e. requiring a minimum of another 65 passes to be sold).

Passes for all routes will be offered for £895.00 for the full academic year. We appreciate this is a large amount for customers to find in one go, so we’ll also be offering customers the option to pay an initial deposit of £100.00 and then to pay the remaining balance in 6 instalments of £135.84, starting in September 2025.

These passes will additionally offer travel on all of our local bus services in the CountryZone. Tickets other than the route-specific passes will no longer be valid on Blue Bus services.

Please click the service number below to purchase a pass:

BB1 – This will initially incorporate travel for customers currently using either the BB1 or BB1A services from South Oxford, Kennington, Radley, Abingdon, Drayton & Steventon.

BB2 – This will offer travel from all points currently served by the BB2: Clifton Hampden, Berinsfield, Dorchester, Shillingford, Benson (Marina), Wallingford & Brightwell-cum-Sotwell.

BB4 – This will initially incorporate travel for customers currently using either the BB4 or BB5 services from East Hanney, Grove, Wantage, East Hendred, Chilton & Harwell.

Should some pick up locations or services prove unviable based on the number of sign ups, we’ll contact affected customers in good time any payments made will be refunded in full.

Parents are kindly asked to purchase a pass for their child by 30th June 2025. We will review the number of passes sold in early July to confirm whether additional buses will be added to specific routes and to finalise which services will operate from September.

As well as our BB services, we operate a comprehensive network of frequent local bus services linking Didcot with Wantage, Harwell, Wallingford, Henley, Abingdon, Steventon, Drayton, Sutton Courtenay, Milton and beyond – full details can be found here. Our range of CountryZone tickets will continue to be available for use on these services. Our ‘Didcot Inner’ tickets will not be available for the 2025/26 academic year.