School transport starts again shortly. What operators get asked in week one.

The Ministry for Education provides free transport for students in compulsory schooling and kindergarten across State, Church and Independent schools. The state school service alone runs over 980 routes daily. Applications for 2026/27 opened on 4 May and closed on 17 July, so the routes are set and the vehicles are being allocated now.

Every vehicle used on the scheme has to be approved by Transport Malta to carry school children. The scheme also runs a one address per child policy, so a pick-up or drop-off at a different address is not permitted, and parents are responsible for being present at the designated points.

That last rule is where the first week goes wrong in practice. A parent is standing at the designated point, the vehicle is somewhere in traffic, and nobody can tell them whether it is two minutes away or twenty. The complaint that follows is rarely about the route. It is about not knowing.

This is the specific case public link sharing was built for. A parent gets a link, opens it on a phone, and sees the vehicle on a map. There is no account to create, no app to install, and no password for an operator to reset in September when four hundred people need one at once. The link can be scoped to one vehicle and one time window, so it covers the morning and afternoon run and nothing else, and it can be revoked the moment a child changes route.

For the operator the other week-one question is who was driving which route. Driver identification by card, tag or app attributes each trip automatically, which matters when a school asks for a record and matters more if there is ever an incident. On a hardwired install the vehicle can be configured so it will not start until a driver identifies.

One boundary worth stating plainly. This tracks vehicles, not children. Yipii does not offer pupil-level tracking, and a system that identified individual children would need a different product and a different lawful basis under the GDPR. What we provide is visibility of the vehicle, which is what parents are actually asking for.