Every day, numerous pupils around the world spend a large part of their day commuting to and from school. Particularly in remote areas where distances are long, school commutes are often made either by bus or taxi. If the school is far from the pupil’s home or the journey is otherwise deemed too dangerous, the pupil is entitled to free school transport.

In Finland, the most sparsely populated country in the European Union, thousands of children are covered by school transport. During the 2000s, due to depopulation of rural regions the Finnish school network has dramatically shrunk by almost half, resulting in long school commutes (Lehtonen, 2021). A maximum duration for daily commute (2,5 to 3 hours) is regulated in the Finnish Basic Education Act (628/1998).

In this presentation, we present our study on Finnish school transport policy. Utilising the writings of Robert E. Goodin (2010) and Jens Tyssedal (2021) on temporal justice as our theoretical framework we asked, how school transport, temporality and temporal justice shows in official policy documents published by key authorities at the national level.

Four policy documents published in 2020-22 were analysed. The documents were published by key authorities in educational governance: the Finnish Government, Finnish National Agency for Education (the executive authority) and Regional State Administrative Agency (the evaluative authority). In the documents, we analysed how school transport was described and especially how temporality was manifested by the key agencies.

Our analysis showed that despite a strong egalitarian discourse, temporality and temporal justice were not acknowledged profoundly in the documents. Rather, equality of pupils was mainly understood as a spatial and a social issue. Temporal aspects were mostly discussed in quantitative terms, referring to daily maximum duration of commute. The qualitative nature of time was not detected in the documents. In addition, we argue that the current evaluation criteria of Finnish school transport are inadequate to evaluate temporal justice of pupils. With this paper we want to emphasise the importance of temporality in educational policy and governance.

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