RELATED: How much EV charging grant can a school get?
Charging a Minibus Is a Different Design Job
A staff car sits on the car park for seven hours and needs 20 miles back. A minibus does the sports fixture run, the swimming trip and the Duke of Edinburgh weekend, then needs to be full again by Monday morning. Same grant, different design.
The practical answer for most schools is still 7kW, on a dedicated socket the minibus does not share with staff cars. Overnight on 7kW puts well over 100 miles into any minibus battery, which covers a typical school’s weekly pattern with margin. Schools running genuinely high mileage transport, such as daily SEN routes, sometimes justify higher power hardware, and that changes the electrical design, which is exactly what the survey establishes.
The Vehicle Side, Honestly
No national scheme currently pays schools towards an electric minibus the way the plug in grants once supported vans. Worth checking before you commit: local authority clean air and fleet funds, which occasionally cover school transport, and leasing arrangements where the grant funded charging strengthens the business case. The chargers, at least, are three quarters funded.
RELATED: Will a school’s electrical supply support EV chargers?
Plan Both Together
The mistake we see is schools installing staff charging this year and discovering next year the minibus needs a socket the design never allowed for. Cabling and switchgear sized once, with a dedicated minibus bay in the plan, costs almost nothing extra during the first installation and saves a second civils project later. Tell us about the minibus ambition at the survey even if the vehicle is two budgets away.
