(12 Feb 2023, 6:02 pm)MurdnunoC wrote It was more or less the same when I attended school in the early-mid 90s. Although it didn't apply to me as I lived within walking distance of the school, pupils were issued with a red bus pass which permitted travel between two points (School and, for example, Whickham, Rowlands Gill, Ryton, Dunston, Chopwell etc.) within specific time-windows before and after school.

Like you, I knew of pupils who opted not to use the school bus for whatever reason, and travelled to Metrocentre before transferring onto another service. As far as I'm aware, nobody was ever refused travel for doing this.

That was the same with our passes and I started secondary in 2008, it had the school and the village on, along with the time window.
I think it was something like between 8am and 6pm?

I refused to use the scholars because of the absolute scum that happened to live in my village, so would always take the GNE bus, even if it did mean hiking up a hill to get to it (10 points if you can guess both locations lol)

We would often just go to the Metrocentre on the bus pass then try and get back home with it as well, often the drivers would just let us on but there were a few drivers that would refuse because we could have used the direct bus, or because it was too late.