Escorts in German school transport: when the funding body pays

Whether someone travels along tells you little about billing. Two other questions matter. Who provides the escort, and who funds it? Only the combination shows whether a line item may be invoiced.

On many order forms this is a single field labelled "escort yes/no". A tick records that someone travels along, but not on what basis. Six months later nobody can reconstruct from the file whether an approval existed at the time or whether the mother rode along in the first week of term because the child cried at the pick-up point. That is exactly where the later queries come from.

Funding comes from two areas of law, and they follow different logic. Under school law the federal states regulate school transport, and the Schulträger or Aufgabenträger (the public body responsible for the school or for the transport task) bears the cost. Under social law, integration assistance under Part 2 of the SGB IX (Book Nine of the German Social Code) applies where the transport is disability-related and necessary for participation.

• School law, example North Rhine-Westphalia: under section 11 of the Schülerfahrkostenverordnung NRW, the travel costs of an escort count as necessary school transport costs where the necessity of the escort has been evidenced for pupils with an intellectual or physical disability.
• Integration assistance, education: section 112 SGB IX governs benefits for participation in education, including assistance with schooling within compulsory education.
• Integration assistance, mobility: section 83 (1) no. 1 SGB IX lists transport services, in particular by a dedicated transport service. Under subsection 2, they go to beneficiaries who cannot reasonably be expected to use public transport because of the nature and severity of their disability.
• Assistance: section 78 SGB IX separates the taking over of activities, including accompaniment, from qualified assistance delivered by trained specialists. That separation matters again in the section on qualifications below.

That disability-related school travel costs are owed as a participation benefit was confirmed by the Bundessozialgericht in its judgment of 8 May 2024, B 8 SO 3/23 R. The claimant was a pupil whose grammar school lay 1.1 kilometres from her parents home and who could manage that distance neither on foot nor by bike because of impaired joint movement. She took a taxi every day. For the 2017/2018 school year the city paid a mileage allowance of 60.42 euros, while the actual travel costs came to around 2,240 euros.

For a transport operator this has one very practical consequence. Where several bodies could be responsible, responsibility is settled before the first journey, not with the first invoice. An order in which the case handler at the school administration office and the integration assistance body point at each other does not improve because three months of journeys have already been driven. Anyone driving regularly for schools and school authorities therefore keeps the responsible office as a field of its own on the order rather than as a note in the comments.

Under most rules the evidence runs in two stages. Section 6 (1) of the Schülerfahrkostenverordnung NRW sets this out for the school law strand, and section 11 refers back to those same sentences 2 and 3 for the escort.

1. Medical certificate as the standard evidence. The family submits a certificate showing that the transport or the escort is necessary on more than a temporary basis.
2. School or public health officer report in cases of particular doubt. The funding body may require one. In North Rhine-Westphalia the Schulträger bears the cost of that report, while the family bears the cost of the plain medical certificate.
3. Waiver where the need is obvious. Where the necessity of the transport is obvious, the medical certificate may be dispensed with. That is a discretionary decision by the funding body, not an automatic step a transport operator should count on.
4. Approval notice. Only the notice turns an established need into a paid service. It carries a date, a period and a scope.

The last point is routinely underestimated. Approvals expire, usually with the school year, sometimes with the next medical report. Without a diary entry a transport operator eventually drives on a basis that formally no longer exists, and only notices when the invoice comes back reduced.

The week before term starts is the cheapest slot for a stocktake. Which escort approvals are expiring, which have been extended, where has the scope changed? Every point clarified in advance costs less time than a correction after the first monthly invoice.

The transport operator needs the approval, not the medical certificate. Five details are enough for dispatching and for any later query from the funding body.

• Responsible funding body and the file reference of the approval
• Approved scope of service, meaning transport with or without an escort, outbound and return or one direction only
• Valid from and valid until, plus a diary date before expiry
• Whether the escort is provided by the transport operator or by the family
• Date and outcome of the last change notification to the funding body

How far documentation may go at all depends on the legal basis for health data under Article 9 GDPR. If you record the approval properly, you almost never need the medical detail.

Two levels of service belong cleanly apart. General supervision means calming a passenger, checking that belts are fastened, helping with boarding and alighting, securing the handover point. Nursing or medical care during the journey is something else. Section 78 SGB IX maps exactly that separation.

Clients pick this up with varying strictness in their service specifications. Requirements typically run along these lines:

• Extended criminal record certificate under section 30a BZRG (the German Federal Central Criminal Register Act) for everyone in regular contact with children and young people, with a defined renewal interval
• Proof of first aid training, in some cases with a refresher deadline
• Documented briefing on the restraint systems in use and on securing wheelchairs
• A confidentiality undertaking and a commitment on handling social and health data
• Where nursing or medical needs exist, a matching professional qualification, which is then also paid at a different rate

These records form part of the service documentation towards the client. Anyone billing for an escort must be able to show, if challenged, that the person deployed held the required suitability on the specific day of travel. If the regular staff member calls in sick at 6:40 and a stand-in steps up, the same requirement applies to them. Briefing on vehicle equipment belongs in the same bundle as wheelchair securement to DIN 75078.

In dispatching, an approved escort is first of all a capacity question. They occupy a full seat. In a minibus with eight seats and three passengers who require an escort, two seats remain free, not five. If you carry escorts as a soft comfort note in a comment field, you plan systematically too optimistically and correct it on the phone in the morning.

• Seat count: every paid escort counts as a passenger in the capacity calculation.
• Pooling: grouping passengers who require an escort into one vehicle is usually cheaper than spreading them across the fleet. That assumes the approvals permit joint transport and that one escort may supervise several children.
• Time windows: an escort requirement sharpens the effect of tight school and facility timings, because fewer vehicles qualify and every replan gets more expensive.
• Vehicle type: wheelchair spaces and escort seats compete within the same vehicle cross-section, so the assignment cannot be swapped freely.

A cost block of its own appears when the escort travels in one direction only. The return leg is then an empty run. Section 11 sentence 2 of the Schülerfahrkostenverordnung NRW names this case expressly and counts the legs the escort has to travel alone towards the travel costs. Whether the same applies in your specific contract is set out in the client service specification, not in the regulation of another federal state.

Towards families, separating the roles early helps. A parent and passenger platform shows who is picked up when. It does not answer whether a requested escort has actually been approved.

The queries look alike across funding bodies and federal states. They almost never turn on whether someone travelled along. They turn on whether that can be traced back to an approval.

The same gap underlies every one of these cases. Approval, passenger and individual journey belong together, but nowhere as a dated attribute. They connect only in the dispatcher head. Once a dispatching system holds the approval with its period on the passenger and the escort attribute on the individual journey, the question about the legal basis answers itself from the system rather than from the filing cabinet. The same mechanism is what proof of service towards the funding body needs when an invoice is rejected in whole or in part.